


The Breaking of the Shell

by giddytf2



Category: The Witcher (TV), Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types
Genre: Altered Mental States, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst with a Happy Ending, BAMF Yennefer z Vengerbergu | Yennefer of Vengerberg, Blood Magic, Blood and Gore, Blood and Injury, Body Horror, Bottom Jaskier | Dandelion, Crying Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia, Crying Jaskier | Dandelion, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia Has Feelings, Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia Loves Jaskier | Dandelion, Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia Whump, Horror, Hurt Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia, Hurt Jaskier | Dandelion, Hurt/Comfort, Jaskier | Dandelion Loves Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia, Jaskier | Dandelion Whump, M/M, Mental Disintegration, Mind Manipulation, Monsters, OTP Feels, POV Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia, Past Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia/Yennefer z Vengerbergu | Yennefer of Vengerberg, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Protective Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia, Protective Yennefer z Vengerbergu | Yennefer of Vengerberg, Psychological Horror, Self-Hatred, Suicidal Thoughts, Suicide Attempt, Top Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-01
Updated: 2020-06-30
Packaged: 2021-03-02 17:20:11
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 37,603
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24490438
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/giddytf2/pseuds/giddytf2
Summary: Geralt could hear the other heartbeat in Jaskier’s sleep-laden body. It pulsated twice as fast as Jaskier’s heartbeat, in his belly. That belly was not as flat as it used to be. That belly did not have the necessary organs for a second heartbeat to exist in it.But Geralt could hear it, like distant thunder rolling across a black sky, heralding a lightning storm headed straight for them.A heartbeat signified life. A heartbeat was the sound of a muscular organ pounding in the chest of a living entity, pumping blood through a body to keep it alive, to aid in its growth.Jaskier’s heartbeat was a sound that comforted Geralt. It was a sound that staved off the screams of monsters and people he’d killed with his knives, his swords, his bare hands, from his conscious mind. A sound that lulled him into rare deep sleep, while he lied next to Jaskier and listened to its stable rhythm echoing from that hirsute, lean chest.There was nothing comforting about this other heartbeat.______________________________________When Geralt catches the attention of an evil, sadistic sorcerer who wants to hurt the witcher, Jaskier pays the heavy price for it.
Relationships: Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia/Jaskier | Dandelion
Comments: 43
Kudos: 300





	1. PART I

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [The Best of You and Me](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23612626) by [giddytf2](https://archiveofourown.org/users/giddytf2/pseuds/giddytf2). 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello again, Witcher fandom! This is my second contribution, a "Side B" story to my first Geraskier story, [The Best of You and Me](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23612626). Never has a story of mine needed the "graphic depiction of violence" tag more than this one. The other tags should be major warning that this story is as far from fluffy as it gets. Seriously, heed the tags for this one! I did not warn for everything in the tags to avoid spoiling readers, so if you want to know the other potentially triggering stuff in Part I, they're listed in the end notes. Do note they're very spoilerish for certain events!
> 
> I first mentioned this particular story in the [end notes for chapter 6](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23612626/chapters/57492871#chapter_6_endnotes) of _The Best of You and Me_. This had been my initial idea for an mpreg!Jaskier story, but well, by the end of Part I, I think you'll understand why I didn't choose this story as my first foray into the Witcher fandom. 🙃 I have good reason for not tagging this as "mpreg". To me, what happens to Jaskier is body horror in the truest sense of the term, and nothing to do with mpreg as fandom would recognize it. Also, I always warn for major character death, and since the tag isn't there--let that be your reassurance, no matter what happens.
> 
> Unlike on the Netflix show, Geralt and Jaskier weren't separated for 10 years in this story. It follows most of canon up to episode 1x06, and diverges from there. Specifically, right before that [crappy scene where Geralt blames Jaskier for all his burdens](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uy4XNZX6gJw) (booo, Geralt!). That scene never happened for this story, and I wrote what I wished had happened instead. 🤩 [Here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-02axudEXF8) is the wonderful scene of Jaskier sitting with Geralt on the mountain instead, asking Geralt to run away with him to the coast.
> 
> In my head, the evil, sadistic sorcerer is played by [James McAvoy](https://i.pinimg.com/236x/3e/8e/6e/3e8e6e62b96bbd7d2df80e1df9228b19--bearded-men-blue-eyes.jpg). (Don't strangle me, McAvoy fans, please. I just love it when he plays evil characters.)
> 
> Soundtracks:  
> [Sicario OST - Fausto](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xE9nhLxez1I)  
> [Chernobyl OST - Pump Room](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XR68p_k_I88) (for the final section)
> 
> Here be blood and monsters and pain.

Geralt could hear the other heartbeat in Jaskier’s sleep-laden body. It pulsated twice as fast as Jaskier’s heartbeat, in his belly. That belly was not as flat as it used to be. That belly did not have the necessary organs for a second heartbeat to exist in it.

But Geralt could hear it, like distant thunder rolling across a black sky, heralding a lightning storm headed straight for them.

A heartbeat signified life. A heartbeat was the sound of a muscular organ pounding in the chest of a living entity, pumping blood through a body to keep it alive, to aid in its growth.

Jaskier’s heartbeat was a sound that comforted Geralt. It was a sound that staved off the screams of monsters and people he’d killed with his knives, his swords, his bare hands, from his conscious mind. A sound that lulled him into rare deep sleep, while he lied next to Jaskier and listened to its stable rhythm echoing from that hirsute, lean chest.

There was nothing comforting about this other heartbeat.

Nothing should be growing inside Jaskier. Nothing with a heartbeat should be invading and making itself at home inside Jaskier.

But Geralt could _hear_ it, and he was certain that he wasn’t mistaking it for the heartbeat of some animal in the woods surrounding them, that he wasn’t imagining it. It was too close for it to be anywhere but inside Jaskier who lied on his side on his bedroll, facing the campfire.

Geralt stared over the fire at Jaskier’s slack face. Stared at Jaskier’s belly that was covered by a beige, ruffled shirt and that blue-and-red doublet with chest slits that his bard companion cherished so.

Something alive was growing inside Jaskier—and Jaskier didn’t know.

If not for his heightened hearing, Geralt would have never considered the mad possibility that the recent increase in Jaskier’s appetite and devouring of food was connected to the _feeding_ of some _parasite_ inside his friend. It was an insane notion even with his heightened senses whispering to him that something was wrong. Very wrong.

Until last week, he hadn’t heard the other heartbeat, and Jaskier’s normal food portions had been half of his. His witcher metabolism ensured that he had to eat more than humans. Jaskier had always been slimmer than he was, which meant that the day Jaskier ate more than he did in one sitting was the day the Pontar dried up from bank to bank into cracked dirt.

He dreaded finding out that the immense river truly had become a desert.

Last week, before his very eyes, Jaskier had gorged himself on two roasted chickens in a tavern, stripping them to the bone with a ferocity that stunned him. He had almost pinched himself on the cheek to ascertain that he wasn’t in some bizarre dream. It’d been impossible to ignore the wide-eyed stares and aghast murmurings from the other patrons. For once, they hadn’t been gawking at him.

After Jaskier was done with the two chickens, he’d glanced at Geralt’s half-eaten meal with a ravenousness that bordered on obscene. Geralt had pushed his plate to Jaskier, in part to study the bard’s reaction.

Without a word, Jaskier had snatched the plate and gobbled down everything on it, forgoing utensils and using those callused, slender fingers to cram chicken meat and potatoes into a voracious maw. When Jaskier had also eaten the bones, a boulder of ice had formed in Geralt’s belly.

When Jaskier had then stared down at his own shaking, soiled hands with shocked eyes, with quivering lips, that boulder of ice had crushed Geralt’s insides.

Geralt had been terrified.

He still was—because he knew why Jaskier had a parasitic _thing_ growing inside him now.

_You aren’t just a failure at being a witcher. You’re a bloody failure at being any sort of man, aren’t you?_

The sorcerer’s name was Cecil Tenebris. A fucking despicable human of a sorcerer who’d offered Geralt a lucrative contract two months ago. A contract he hadn’t been able to refuse, not when Jaskier had been ill with a terrible cough and fever after being caught in a rainstorm. Without Jaskier’s singing, they’d had to depend on Geralt earning coin to feed themselves or procure a room in an inn.

Their pockets had been empty of any money for days when Tenebris had approached Geralt in the market square of Murivel. He had been seconds away from threatening an apothecary to just hand over the medicine—and it would have been the first time in his prolonged life that he robbed someone, if not for Tenebris stepping in and paying for the medicine with excessive coin.

How ashamed Vesemir would have been of him, if he’d gone through with the threat.

But Jaskier had been ill. Jaskier had needed the medicine.

Geralt had no idea whether Tenebris had intended to impress him with that display of monetary wealth. Although he understood the value of coins and gold for continued survival, he’d never cared to hoard them. Tenebris’s deed had elicited nothing more than a growled word of thanks from him.

In retrospect, the lying, perfidious fucker hadn’t deserved even that.

_You’re Geralt of Rivia, yes? That legendary witcher who’d made quite a name for himself in Blaviken._

In retrospect, he should have whipped out his sword and beheaded Tenebris right there and then. Ended the sorcerer’s foul existence in a bloodbath in front of the teeming crowd, no matter that it might have meant also becoming the Butcher of Murivel.

But Jaskier had been so ill that by the time he’d rushed back to the inn’s stables where Roach and Jaskier were, Jaskier was a miserable ball on the cold stone floor, coughing his lungs out, pallid-faced and shivering. The proprietor of the inn, a grey-haired, stout woman, had been compassionate enough to let them stay the night in the stables despite being unable to pay. She’d also given Jaskier a blanket, which was wrapped around the near-unconscious bard.

Tenebris had followed Geralt there. Watched him roll Jaskier onto his back, lift such a limp upper body upright so Jaskier wouldn’t choke on the white syrup from the dark amber bottle he pressed to colorless lips.

Tenebris had stared at them with piercing eyes that were a lighter blue than Jaskier’s. Tenebris had similar coloring to Jaskier: dark, thick hair, and pale skin, and dark pink lips. Geralt supposed that the sorcerer would have been considered handsome by others, if he could be a trustworthy judge of physical appeal. The sorcerer’s luxurious, red robes and gold jewelry magnified his outward handsomeness.

But no, Tenebris was a fucking despicable, lying, perfidious fiend, and Geralt knew that now.

The sorcerer had offered Geralt a large bag of coins, a bounty of crowns and orens, in return for the slaying of an archgriffin that lurked in the forest near the city. That one detail should have set off an alarm in Geralt’s head: griffins usually inhabited mountains where they hunted marmots and wild goats, appearing near human settlements only if said humans had encroached on their territory, or had numerous livestock to be preyed on.

Tenebris had claimed that the archgriffin had killed a few shepherds, and taken off with a farmer’s young daughter mere days ago. Geralt hadn’t thought to question the claim, for he knew how dangerous griffins could be, how tenacious they could be once they discovered an abundant food source—and Jaskier had needed more medicine. Jaskier had needed a bed to rest in, not the cold stone floor of the stables.

They had needed Tenebris’s money.

After Geralt had accepted the contract, Tenebris had instructed him to collect the archgriffin’s feathers and talons. With a smile that had made him feel slimy scales skimming across his skin. He had simply nodded. Hadn’t thought about the stipulation, until Tenebris had paid for a room in the inn, and Jaskier was ensconced in a comfortable bed, finally starting to recover after another dose of medicine.

What had Cecil Tenebris really wanted from him?

He hadn’t learned the answer to that until the archgriffin was dead. Like Tenebris had said, the creature had been in the forest, going berserk when it saw him approaching with a crossbow armed with explosive arrows, and his silver sword.

It hadn’t flown to attack him, nor used its high-pitched roar to knock him off-balance. It’d made a half-hearted effort to spit corrosive acid at him when he got within range. It’d seemed fettered to the barren ground by invisible shackles.

Its ribs had been showing.

Hadn’t it eaten several shepherds and a young girl already?

Slaying it had been pathetically easy. Slicing through its neck with his sword had seemed like slicing through melted butter. A mass of alarms had gone off in Geralt’s head then—and his retreat from the archgriffin’s corpse to clear his mind, to _think_ , had saved his arse from being incinerated by flames that exploded out of nowhere to annihilate the corpse.

The force of it had blown him off his feet and slammed him into the gnarled trunk of an ash tree. In the incandescence of the flames, he had sprawled on the ground, gasping hot air. Knowing that he had failed, but not knowing what exactly it was he’d failed to do.

Rage had consumed him like the flames had consumed the archgriffin’s corpse upon his return to Murivel. When he’d confronted Tenebris in the inn room, the sorcerer refused to pay him a single coin for not bringing back any feathers or talons. His vision had turned blood-red. His gloved hand had clamped around the sorcerer’s throat, and he hadn’t given a fuck that a more healthy Jaskier was a present witness to him harming a human.

What had Cecil Tenebris really wanted from him?

In retrospect, he should have guessed the answer from Tenebris’s spreading grin of gleeful malice, even as he’d tightened his gloved hand around that scrawny neck and slammed the fucker against the wall. He should have guessed that the archgriffin had been trapped in the forest against its will, that it had been another of Tenebris’s victims in the sick game he’d played with Geralt.

Tenebris had never intended for him to successfully collect the archgriffin’s feathers and talons, had made sure of that by burning the corpse to ashes with magical fire. Tenebris had planned the whole thing from the start. Had probably stalked him and Jaskier for some time, watching them while they traveled across the Continent, observing their behaviors towards each other and their interactions.

In horrifying retrospect, he should have guessed that Tenebris just wanted to hurt him for the fun of it, from the way the sorcerer had stared at a petrified Jaskier with those piercing, _thrilled_ eyes. From the way the fucker had laughed like a delighted boy who’d found a new toy to play with—and destroy.

 _You aren’t just a failure at being a witcher_ , Tenebris had said then. _You’re a bloody failure at being any sort of man, aren’t you?_

Tenebris had shoved him away with an invisible hand as if he’d weighed nothing. He’d landed hard on his back on the floor across the room, all his breath pummeled out of him despite the black armor encasing his upper body. He’d heard Jaskier shout his name.

Time had slowed to a chilling crawl after that.

He’d been frozen on the floor as Tenebris, muttering under his breath, slashed open his own inner forearm with a metal claw attached to the last finger of his right hand. Blood that was almost black had gushed out of the wound. Those wide ice-blue eyes had glowed red. That gleeful, malicious grin had widened until both rows of teeth were bared.

With a violent swing of his arm, Tenebris had flung an ample handful of his blood onto Jaskier’s face.

Jaskier had screamed as the viscous blood took on a life of its own. It had flowed like black, pulsing worms into his gaping mouth, his nostrils, his scrunched-shut eyes.

Geralt had been frozen on the floor, as if fettered by invisible shackles. Powerless to help his friend. Powerless against the vilest of all dark magic, that even demon summoners and corpse manipulators shunned, for fear of it poisoning their souls beyond all divine redemption: blood magic.

While Jaskier had scratched at his own face, had continued to scream in horror and pain, Tenebris had knelt down next to Geralt. Stared down at him, and showed him that smile that made him feel slimy scales scrape his flesh down to the bone.

 _It’s all right, Geralt of Rivia_ , Tenebris had murmured, brushing his long, white hair from his face as if they were old friends, as if he had any right to do that. _It’s all right. I’ll make you see what you really are._

Geralt had stared up at the grinning fucker with wide, unblinking eyes. Had memorized every inch of the fucking fiend’s face so he would never forget it. So he could hunt for it, for the rest of his life if he had to, and exterminate its possessor for hurting Jaskier.

_Sshh, it’s all right. I’ll make him see what you really are, too._

Then Jaskier had stopped screaming.

Then Tenebris had pressed blood-drenched fingers to Geralt’s forehead.

When his eyes had opened again, he was reclined on the bed. Jaskier had been lying on his side next to him under the blankets, facing him. Jaskier’s face had been clean, unmarred, flushed with regained health. Jaskier’s face had been relaxed in slumber, his dark pink lips quirked up as if he was having a sweet dream.

On the bedside table behind Jaskier had stood a large bag bursting with coins.

If it hadn’t been for Tenebris’s manipulation of his mind and memories with magic, Geralt would have tossed that bag of coins out the window. He would have woken Jaskier up. Would have had them dashing out of the inn, out of the fucking city, and never, ever looked back. He would have sought Yennefer out, even if he had to prostrate himself before her and beg her for help like a mangy dog.

But he hadn’t remembered what had happened in that inn room. He’d reached over Jaskier for the bag of coins, and opened it to see its bounty of crowns and orens. He’d smirked down at their newfound wealth, earned from another job well done. When Jaskier had awakened, he’d showed him the money, and he’d reveled in his friend’s jubilation. In his friend’s guileless smile that was as bright as the morning sunshine streaming in through the window.

He hadn’t remembered what had happened in that inn room in Murivel two months ago.

Until tonight.

Until he and Jaskier were alone in the woods after a long day’s journey on the open road. Until he had no other rationale anymore to explain that persistent third heartbeat he kept hearing no matter where he and his bard companion went. Until his true memories of events had returned to him like a lightning storm breaking overhead, as if someone had twisted a key into a lock in his skull at an appointed time, and opened a door into hell.

Cecil Tenebris had stalked him, deceived him, sneaked under his guard by exploiting their misfortunes. Had used blood magic to embed some parasite in Jaskier’s belly. Had coerced Geralt into witnessing the frightful violation, just for the sickening fun of it. Just to hurt him.

With every beat of Jaskier’s heart, with every passing minute, the parasite was growing bigger and bigger inside his belly.

And Geralt didn’t know what to do. He didn’t know what to do to save his best friend from it.

◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊

Jaskier was vomiting again. The next town was a day away, even if Roach bore Geralt and Jaskier on her back for the rest of the journey. Perhaps it was a paltry blessing that they were on the open road, for Jaskier’s bout of sickness this time was so bad that he spewed every few minutes onto the grass next to the road.

“Oh gods, what—what the ever loving _fuck_ —did I eat this morning,” Jaskier croaked after another round of retching. “ _Ugh_. I feel horrible.”

Jaskier looked horrible, too, but Geralt wasn’t about to mention that. There were dark bags under Jaskier’s large, watery eyes. His appealing face was ashen, and his lips were grey. For someone who was now eating enough to rival a witcher’s appetite, his high cheekbones were alarmingly prominent.

Where did all that nourishment go in Jaskier’s body?

Geralt halted Roach in her tracks, then dismounted. He strode across the short width of the road to Jaskier, grasping his friend’s upper arm to steady him. Jaskier was swaying on his feet. Jaskier was clutching at his belly with his right hand.

Geralt could see that Jaskier’s belly had swelled a little more in the past two days, since that night in the woods when Geralt had _remembered_ again.

He had to restrain himself from whipping out a knife and cutting into Jaskier’s belly. Cutting into the _thing_ that was obviously hurting his friend.

“We’re taking a break,” he growled, tugging Jaskier across the road to Roach and then grabbing her reins.

“But—we’ve barely—s’not even noon—”

“A _break_ , Jaskier. Come on. You need it.”

Jaskier didn’t protest after that. Geralt led him and Roach into the dense forest flanking the road, searching for the nearest clearing, gripping Jaskier’s upper arm all the way. Jaskier didn’t protest that either, silently trudging abreast with Geralt. That atypical silence unsettled him more than anything else: Jaskier would be the first to point out that he was a blatherer-prater, and was so adept at it that people all over the Continent paid him to put his blathering-prattling to song.

Geralt couldn’t recall the last time his bard companion had played his lute, much less sung a song.

Tenebris’s bag of coins was providing them with accommodations, food, and new clothing like never before, without Geralt or Jaskier having to work for a while—and Geralt hated that. Hated that the fucking sorcerer’s money was at least alleviating some of Jaskier’s suffering with the adequate stockpile of dried food they had on hand.

Geralt couldn’t bear to look at Jaskier while his friend devoured more bread and smoked cheese: it was as if all that vomiting minutes ago had never occurred, as if gobbling down food was a visceral compulsion that overrode everything else. They’d had a big breakfast mere hours ago in the scanty town they’d stopped in overnight, so big that the barmaid serving them had joked that Jaskier was “eating for multiple people in his stomach”. Jaskier hadn’t said anything, too busy demolishing a loaf of buttered bread. Geralt hadn’t said anything either, so nauseated that he couldn’t swallow another mouthful of anything.

Jaskier had promptly polished off his plate of food too after he pushed it to the bard.

They now sat side by side on a fallen, moss-coated tree trunk, while Roach nibbled on grass nearby. Geralt had no choice but to listen to Jaskier’s teeth gnashing, to Jaskier’s throat swallowing down more and more food. To that accursed, rapid heartbeat in Jaskier’s belly.

It was growing stronger.

Geralt’s chance to kill it, to save his best friend, was shrinking.

“Jaskier.”

Jaskier sucked on oily fingertips before replying, “Yeah?”

Geralt turned his head to gaze at Jaskier, his gloved hands pressed flat on his thighs. Jaskier didn’t appear any better. If anything, his friend looked worse, as if his life-force was being drained ounce by ounce from him.

“What do you remember about Murivel?”

Jaskier’s brow creased. “Murivel? Wasn’t that—” His brow smoothened. “Oh, right, I was so sick then, wasn’t I? And you hunted and killed that archgriffin.”

Geralt had to bite his tongue to not comment on how harrowingly sick Jaskier looked in this moment.

“Do you remember the sorcerer who’d—” _Deceived me. Misused me._ “Hired me to kill it?”

Geralt felt nauseated again when Jaskier’s ashen face lit up with a grateful smile.

“Ah, yes, Cecil Tenebris! A good chap, wasn’t he?”

Geralt’s gloved hands clenched into tight fists on his thighs. Just hearing the sadistic fucker’s name from Jaskier’s lips, said with such _gratitude_ , made him more determined than ever to find the fucker and _hurt_ him.

“Why do you say that?”

He kept his voice calm and low. Jaskier didn’t deserve any of his anger. Jaskier was Tenebris’s victim.

Jaskier blinked at him, then said, “Geralt, you _are_ aware that the very, _very_ big bag of coins we have came from him. Aren’t you?” Jaskier’s eyebrows shot up a high forehead. “You know, the big bag of coins he handed to you for killing that archgriffin?” Before Geralt could respond, Jaskier’s lips curled up in that grateful smile again. “I’m certainly appreciative of the new doublets and breeches those coins bought me in Tretogor.”

An iota of tension seeped from Geralt’s body as he recalled Jaskier trying on several doublets and matching breeches in that luxury clothing shop in the heart of the Redanian capital. Geralt would never have walked into such an establishment on his own, but with Jaskier strutting in and instantly plucking out the outfits he wanted, no one had paid attention to him. No one had dared to, anyhow.

One particular outfit stood out in his memory: a teal one, with gold accents and embroidered birds and flowers on the doublet. The doublet also had puffy, slit shoulders that tapered into long, snug sleeves down to the wrists. Its high collar accentuated Jaskier’s long, pale neck. Under the doublet, a gold shirt with a low v-neck revealed a swath of Jaskier’s hirsute chest. The teal breeches fitted to Jaskier’s lower body like a second skin.

The outfit had been resplendent on Jaskier. He had elicited sincere praise from the shopkeepers, especially when he’d pirouetted with an eagle’s grace and then spread his arms high as if he’d just finished a fine performance.

But Jaskier’s eyes had been on him alone, and Jaskier had asked only his opinion on the outfit.

A single grunt had apparently been enough approval for Jaskier to purchase it.

It was now folded and stored in one of the leather satchels hanging over Roach’s hip. It was a beautiful thing that had brought such a radiant smile to Jaskier’s face, that had infused a dance into Jaskier’s steps outside the shop.

It was a beautiful thing that had been purchased with such tainted money.

“Tell me,” Geralt growled. “Tell me what happened.”

Jaskier blinked multiple times at him.

“What? You mean, what—what happened when you got back? After you killed the archgriffin?”

“Yes.”

Jaskier opened his mouth, then shut it a few seconds later. He squinted at Geralt, as if he was trying to see past the impassive expression Geralt had on, then said, “ _Well_ , when you got back to the room, I was feeling much better. You took off your weapons, and you were cleaning your sword when Tenebris showed up. You let him in, he thanked you for killing the archgriffin, handed you the bag of coins, and left.”

Geralt stared at Jaskier. He didn’t know what Jaskier saw on his face, but whatever it was, it made Jaskier squint at him again.

“Geralt, you’re not suffering from some sort of _amnesia_ , are you?”

Gods, he would have laughed, if he didn’t feel so much like bowing his head and weeping instead.

_No, my friend, you and I had our minds fucked by a bloody loathsome sorcerer for his entertainment, that’s all._

_And I couldn’t stop him. I couldn’t stop him from hurting you._

He did bow his head. He shut his eyes. Drew in a deep breath, then let it out slowly.

His fists refused to unclench. They were shaking on his thighs.

“Geralt?” He saw and felt Jaskier’s hand rest on one of his fists, like a little bird alighting on a hefty branch. “What’s going on, Geralt? Talk to me.”

He had to swallow past a jagged rock in his throat before he could rasp, “That wasn’t what happened, Jaskier. That’s what Tenebris wanted you to believe had happened.”

Jaskier let out a huff of disbelief. His hand remained on Geralt’s, tightening around Geralt’s fist.

“What—what do you mean by that?”

Geralt raised his head and gazed at Jaskier again. Whenever those blue eyes widened so much, it usually seemed to erase decades from Jaskier’s age, to turn him into an innocent boy. Or a charming puppy.

With those dark bags under them, Jaskier looked like a frail ghost that was slipping out of Geralt’s fingers. Slipping away no matter what Geralt did to keep him.

“Tenebris did something to us. To you.” Geralt forced his fist to unclench, then enclosed his gloved hand around Jaskier’s bare hand. “What really happened was—I went back to the room, and Tenebris was already inside. Sitting on a chair and—staring at you sleeping.”

He had to pause to suck in a cool breath. To not hunch forward and do a bit of vomiting himself. He could see Tenebris in that wooden chair near the bed, sitting on it like an arrogant king. Staring at Jaskier as if the bard was some insect he was going to dissect while still conscious.

“When he saw me, he demanded for the archgriffin’s feathers and talons. But he knew all along that I would never bring them back for him.”

Jaskier murmured, “Why?”

“He—he probably set some sort of timed spell. Or a spell that could be triggered after I killed the archgriffin. Its corpse had burst into flames after I decapitated it.”

“Oh,” Jaskier breathed.

“I think he’d shadowed us for some time. He probably had that archgriffin under his control for a long time, starving it until it couldn’t fight back. Then he just—waited for the chance to offer me the contract.” Geralt gritted his teeth, then said, “And used my plotted failure as an excuse to—hurt us.”

Jaskier’s already ashen face blanched.

“You know something’s wrong, Jaskier. Very wrong.”

Jaskier lowered his eyes and averted his head.

“You _know_. You’ve been eating so much, and yet you’re—looking more ill by the day. And you’ve been vomiting every morning. For days.”

Even with a glove on, he could feel the trembling of Jaskier’s hand in his.

“Jaskier.” He tightened his hand around Jaskier’s. “Tenebris _did_ something to you.”

_There’s something alive growing inside you. I can hear its horrendous heartbeat. I can see it swelling your belly._

_But I don’t know how to tell you, without you going mad from the knowledge._

For the longest time, Jaskier said nothing. Jaskier stared down at the grass around their feet.

Geralt drew in a breath, then let it out. Drew in a longer breath, then let it out slower. He held on to Jaskier’s hand. He held on to his friend.

He heard more than saw Jaskier swallow hard.

“Perhaps we—we should find a healer,” Jaskier whispered. “When we reach the next town.”

Geralt shut his eyes. He felt a breeze brush past his face and ruffle his long, white hair. He heard Jaskier’s heart still beating strong in that lean, hirsute chest. He opened his eyes again, and weaved his fingers between Jaskier’s.

“Okay. We’ll find one as soon as we get there.”

_Then we’ll cut the fucking parasite out of you, and you’ll be all right._

_You’ll be all right._

◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊

The healer was a gangling woman with curly blonde hair. She had genial brown eyes that softened with sympathy when they landed on Jaskier’s ashen face.

“Oh, you poor thing,” she said to Jaskier. “Come, sit down. Sit here.”

The healer lived in a small cottage on the outskirts of the town. It’d been easy enough to find her after Geralt had asked the bartender in the tavern about local healers: she was the bartender’s younger sister, and was respected by the community for her compassion and diligence. The bartender had taken one glance at Jaskier, and given Geralt directions to her cottage without being impelled.

Jaskier collapsed more than sat on the cushioned chair she offered in a cozy room lined with shelves of concoctions and dried ingredients in bottles of various colors. The journey to the town had taken a visible toll on him, and Geralt could barely conceal his worry for his friend. He could hear Jaskier’s erratic breathing as if it was in his ear. He got a whiff of the sweat dampening Jaskier’s scalp and skin under his clothes, and it smelled—abnormal. Like a stench he would expect from a kikimora steeped in swamp waste. Or rotten blood excreting from a human corpse.

It had to be the parasite’s stench exuding through Jaskier’s pores.

Its heart was beating louder than ever in Jaskier’s swelling belly.

“He’s been vomiting every morning for at least a week,” Geralt said to the healer, standing next to Jaskier, resting a hand on Jaskier’s slumped shoulder. “But his appetite has—grown. Among other things.”

Jaskier said nothing. His right hand was pressed to his belly.

“Hm,” the healer replied. “Food poisoning, probably.”

Geralt knew it wasn’t, but he didn’t respond. It was taking a great deal of willpower not to clench his hand around Jaskier’s shoulder. He watched the healer drag a chair to sit in front of Jaskier. She was dressed in layers of colorful robes, and she had to rearrange them around her body and legs before she could sit down.

“Now, let’s see what’s going on, shall we?”

She had long-fingered hands that she held palms out in front of Jaskier’s belly. Her eyelids lowered to half-mast, and her brown eyes began to glow. She mumbled to herself.

On his chest, under his armor and linen shirt, Geralt felt his wolf medallion vibrate as she employed her magic to examine Jaskier.

He clenched his free hand into a fist at his side. He held his breath, and felt a muscle tic in his lower jaw.

He was prepared for the healer’s reaction. He didn’t so much as twitch when she shrieked and recoiled from Jaskier. She jumped to her feet. Staggered back and almost tripped over her chair. He felt Jaskier jolt under his hand. Heard Jaskier’s breathing and heartbeat kick up a notch.

The fucking parasite’s heartbeat also sped up.

“Healer!” Geralt growled. “What is it?”

She was flattening herself to the wall, pressing her back and hands on it. Staring at Jaskier’s belly with eyes so wide that Geralt could see the stark white around their brown irises that had stopped glowing. Her breaths were frantic and loud.

“You’re—” Her eyes scoured Jaskier from head to feet. “You’re clearly a—a _man_.”

“Wh-what? I—of course I am—”

Geralt gave Jaskier’s shoulder a squeeze.

“Healer.” Geralt’s fierce tone hacked through her panic, and she dragged her gaze up to his face. “What did you see?”

She glanced at Jaskier’s belly again. She bit her lower lip hard, then covered her mouth with a shaking hand.

“I—” She lowered her hand to her chest. Clenched it into a shaking fist. “It’s impossible. But—I saw—a _baby_. Growing inside him. It’s—attached to his stomach, somehow.”

Geralt’s fingers dug into Jaskier’s shoulder, but Jaskier didn’t react to that. Jaskier was gaping at the healer, his grey lips parted and quivering, his eyes as round as hers in utter shock.

“A baby,” Jaskier whispered.

A bolt of apprehension scorched down Geralt’s spine. That boulder of ice was crushing his insides once more, turning his blood to freezing rivers in his veins.

Jaskier sounded—joyous.

Why the fuck would Jaskier be _joyous_ about this? About an unnatural parasite growing inside him, and _killing_ him?

“It’s not a baby. A sorcerer did this to him—put this _parasite_ inside him,” Geralt snarled at the healer. “Can you remove it?”

“No.”

The vehement reply hadn’t come from the healer.

With astounding speed and strength, Jaskier leapt from the chair and tore himself out of Geralt’s grip to face him. He was clutching at his belly with both hands. He glared at Geralt. Backed away when Geralt strode around the cushioned chair towards him.

“No. I want to keep it. I want the baby.”

Geralt froze in place. He knew there were no invisible shackles fettering him this time, but he still couldn’t move. He felt as if every part of his body under his skin had solidified into ice, including his brain, and he couldn’t comprehend the words that Jaskier’s grey lips had spat out.

“Jaskier,” he said, his voice hoarse. “It’s not a baby.”

Jaskier shook his head from side to side. Backed away a few more steps, and Geralt knew in that instant that if he let Jaskier leave now, if he let Jaskier out of his sight—he would never see his best friend again.

He lunged at Jaskier and seized his upper arms.

“Jaskier. Listen to me. _Listen to me!_ ” He shook Jaskier hard as the bard struggled against him, clawing at his covered arms. “It’s not a baby inside you. It’s—it’s a _monster_ , Jaskier—”

“No, _no_ , it’s not—”

“Cecil Tenebris used blood magic on you, on me! He threw his blood at your face, and it went _inside you_ and—” He tightened his hands around Jaskier’s upper arms, his voice strangling in his throat at the denial, the desperation in Jaskier’s wide, glistening eyes. “It’s become a monster growing in your belly. We have to get it out. To _save your life_. Do you understand?”

“No,” Jaskier mumbled. “No, no.”

Jaskier kept shaking his head from side to side. Kept shaking in Geralt’s unyielding grip, as if it was all that kept him standing upright.

The salt-laden tears that rolled down Jaskier’s wan cheeks carved agonizing grooves into Geralt’s hammering heart.

“Cecil Tenebris,” the healer whispered.

Geralt dragged his eyes away from Jaskier’s wet face and glanced at the healer. She appeared almost as ashen as Jaskier did. She was flattening herself even more against the wall. She stared at Geralt with those wide eyes, her lower lip quivering in terror.

“Cecil Tenebris did this to him?”

Geralt had to force himself to not squeeze his eyes shut, to maintain his impassive expression, when Jaskier fell willingly into his arms and allowed himself to be hugged tight. He tucked Jaskier’s head into the crook between his neck and shoulder. The embrace was as much to prevent Jaskier from fleeing as it was to give himself the tiniest measure of reassurance.

“What do you know about him?” Geralt growled.

The healer now stared at Jaskier with pity. So much pity.

“He’s evil incarnate. The devil of devils,” she replied, scarcely above a croaky whisper. “He passed through the town two years ago, when we still hadn’t known what he really was. He had a drink at my brother’s tavern and performed some magical tricks for the crowd.”

She lowered her eyes to stare at the floor, as if in shame.

“He was a good-looking man. Everyone stared at him. All the women were throwing themselves at him. Later in the evening, he left the tavern with the youngest daughter of the butcher. The next day, he was gone, and so was she. Everyone thought she’d eloped with him. But—her father found her months later, in a field miles from the town.”

Her indrawn breath was stuttered.

“Her corpse was—was _mutilated_ from chest to groin. It was as if she’d burst open like a putrid fruit. As if something inside her had—”

She faltered into a fraught silence. She stared at Jaskier’s belly, and mercifully kept her revelation to herself.

But Geralt knew what she’d been about to say.

Geralt now knew the gruesome fate that awaited Jaskier, unless they removed the monstrous thing from his belly.

“Please leave,” the healer said.

Geralt stared at her, tightening his arms around a docile, silent Jaskier. A Jaskier that frightened him with such aberrant passiveness and reticence. A Jaskier he did not know.

“Help him.”

“There’s nothing I can do for him.” The tears in her eyes were genuine, as was her sorrow. “There’s nothing anyone can do for him, if Tenebris’s blood magic is behind this.”

Geralt felt that boulder of ice crushing his insides again. Crushing the hope in his chest to dust against his ribs.

“ _Help him_. Please.”

“No one’s dared to go after Tenebris, despite what he did to that poor girl. Because he’s powerful. He’s extremely wealthy. And he’ll gladly harm and kill anyone who gets in his way, with his corrupted magic.” The healer wiped her eyes with a trembling hand. “I’m so sorry, witcher. Your friend is already dead.”

Jaskier was so silent and still in his embrace. He could hear Jaskier’s thudding heartbeat, but he could also hear the heartbeat of the fucking monstrous _thing_ in Jaskier’s belly.

“You’re wrong,” he snarled, his teeth bared in a rictus of anger, of despair. “ _You’re wrong_.”

The healer said nothing to that. She averted her face from them, as if they were already gone. As if they had already ceased to be.

◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊

Geralt didn’t know where to start searching for Yennefer to save Jaskier from his gruesome fate. They had separated almost a year ago on terms that certainly hadn’t been amicable, on that mountain after the dragon hunt. After Borch had predicted that she would never regain her womb, and that Geralt would lose her.

It had hurt like a dagger to the chest to watch her walk away from him. To know that she would never trust him again, or trust anything she felt for him. He had meant it when he’d told her that she was important to him. He’d been so sure at the time that she was what pleased him, that she would give a witcher like him the happiness that so many others in this world were blessed to have.

In hindsight, he should have heeded Jaskier’s old albeit sage advice: that any declarations of love during or after sex were never to be trusted, especially if they came from oneself. Yennefer had been far wiser than him in that respect.

_Disregard for other people’s freedom has become quite your trademark._

It was easier for him to admit now that she had been right with that jab. Right to distrust him and her feelings after she’d learned about the wish he’d made to the djinn in Rinde. It had been a selfish, thoughtless wish. The act of making that wish had saved her life—but he could have made any other wish, a wish that didn’t yoke her to him against her will and robbed her of any choice about it for the rest of her life. Such was the appalling irony that he’d inflicted on her what fucking destiny inflicted on him throughout his life.

And he had dared to think that he cared for her, to have done that to her.

Perhaps in another life, another world where he was an immature arsehole, he would have made another dreadful mistake when Jaskier had shown up after Yennefer walked away. Perhaps he would have lashed out at his best friend of twenty years. Yelled at him, and blamed him for all his problems when _he_ had taken his own actions, made his own choices, and wasn’t strong enough to accept the consequences of those actions and choices.

But no, when Jaskier had greeted him and made that inane comment about the day, then stood next to him, he’d known better than to do all that. It hadn’t been Jaskier’s fault that he lost Yennefer: it was his own. Jaskier had stood by his side ever since they’d met for the first time in that tavern in Posada, even after he’d attempted to drive the bard away from him. Jaskier had refused to leave him. Refused to acknowledge that he was bad news. That he wasn’t human. That he was—something worse. Much worse.

Jaskier had gazed at him with those large, blue eyes. With naught but a look, Jaskier had reminded him that he was still worth something, no matter how many times he was abandoned. Even if he was a witcher and nothing more.

_The coast, you said?_

There had been a hand’s breadth of space between them. He had stared forward and seen nothing. He’d listened to Jaskier’s heart beating, and beating. Beating faster after his murmured question.

Jaskier had stared at his profile for a long minute.

_Do you—do you really want to go to the coast? With me?_

Even now, Geralt wondered if he’d only imagined the quaver in Jaskier’s voice when Jaskier had said those two last words.

_Perhaps that will please me, for a while._

He had kept staring forward when he’d replied. Honed his hearing to listen to Jaskier’s quickened heartbeat and nothing else.

He’d almost asked Jaskier if he was still trying to work out what pleased him, or if he’d determined the thing, or person, that did. But he hadn’t.

In heart-wrenching hindsight, he should have, while he had the chance.

He had encountered Borch again, days after he and Jaskier had walked down the mountain together, while they were traveling to the nearest coast. The golden dragon in human form had picked a convenient moment to appear in front of Geralt on the street, when Jaskier strode into an inn to book a room.

_Do you know why you were destined to lose her, witcher?_

He hadn’t been interested in the answer. He’d turned to Roach who stood beside him and petted her muzzle, gripping her reins in his other hand. The last thing he’d wanted was for that recent loss to be rubbed in like salt in a knife wound. Borch had probably seen that on his face, but answered himself anyway.

_It is for the best. For your own good, and hers. You can’t see this now, but you will._

He’d swiveled and opened his mouth in the beginnings of what Jaskier would have described as an “epic rant full of manly grunts” to leave him the fuck alone—and then Borch had swept away all his exasperation and words with two calmly stated sentences.

_Because you’re destined for someone else. Someone who’s been waiting a very long time for you to finally see what you really are._

He’d stared at Borch with wide eyes. He’d been totally stumped for a response. So, he’d lost Yennefer because he was meant for someone else? There was someone else out there for whom he was destined? Someone who was—what, destined to fall in love with him? Someone who already _was_ in love with him?

Borch had seemed to imply that whoever this person was, it was someone who knew Geralt, and knew him very well. Someone who’d known him for a very long time.

It had been the maddest thing he’d heard in ages.

There was no woman other than Yennefer who fitted the bill in any way.

 _Then I hope I never meet her_ , he’d retorted eventually. _I already know what I am._

Borch hadn’t been discouraged by his retort at all. In fact, the golden dragon had beamed at him, as if his answer had been precisely what he’d hoped to hear.

_So what are you?_

Again, Geralt had been stumped for a response. He hadn’t expected Borch to ask him that. Not so directly, and not with that satisfied smile that confused him.

He’d narrowed his eyes at Borch. Quirked up his lips in a sneer.

 _I am what I kill_ , he’d answered.

Borch’s smile hadn’t waned while he gazed deep into his amber eyes. His sneer, on the other hand, had twisted into a frown of puzzlement. It had seemed then that Borch was smiling because the golden dragon could see something within him that he himself couldn’t. But what?

Jaskier had popped up at his side seconds later to tell him their room was ready—and Borch had vanished into thin air as swiftly as he’d appeared.

Almost a year later, Geralt still didn’t know who this mysterious person was for whom he was destined. He was tempted to ask Jaskier, but Jaskier was asleep beside him, tucked under multiple blankets. Jaskier needed the slumber. Needed this comfortable inn room with its comfortable, spacious bed and its comfortable, thick blankets. Needed the recovery from the fallout at the healer’s cottage today.

So did he.

He sat back against the headboard of the bed, frowning to himself. He couldn’t comprehend how destiny had anyone arranged for him in the future, how he could be happy, if he was going to lose Jaskier.

Did that mean that he was going to find a way to save his best friend? Or did that mean that he was doomed to lose Jaskier, and would find this mysterious person later in his life? This person who knew him, had known him for a very long time—who was waiting for him to finally see what he really was?

His answer to that was still the same one he’d given to Borch: he was what he killed.

He was a monster himself.

Despite Jaskier’s songs about him—about the White Wolf and his monster-slaying adventures—he knew many people still hated him on sight for being a witcher. He knew they looked at him, at his white hair and his amber eyes, and saw the monster he’d always been. How could he not be one, if his own mother had forsaken him and dumped him at the foot of Kaer Morhen like fetid detritus?

He couldn’t imagine anyone wanting him after seeing, after _knowing_ what he really was.

He couldn’t imagine anyone being as faithful to him as Jaskier.

But if Borch was right, this person already knew what he really was—and was still destined for him. Who could this person be, who saw the monster that he was, and still accepted him as he was?

It chilled him to the marrow of his bones, just thinking of the repugnant possibility that Borch had been referring to Cecil Tenebris.

_It’s all right, Geralt of Rivia._

_It’s all right. I’ll make you see what you really are._

It had taken him this long to realize it, but Borch had never specified that the person would be a woman. He’d assumed that.

He had no clue how long Tenebris had known about him, or how much the sorcerer knew about him. Tenebris startlingly fitted the bill in a way that even Yennefer couldn’t.

But—why had Borch looked so _gratified_ when he’d imparted the revelation about this mysterious person for whom he was destined? As if this person was someone who would please a witcher like him, and that he would please this person in return? As if this person would give a damned witcher like him _happiness?_

Geralt couldn’t comprehend it. He couldn’t comprehend what the fuck was going on, or why the gods were punishing Jaskier if _he_ was the one they wanted to suffer, the monster they wanted to shackle.

He couldn’t comprehend how he could ever be happy, in a future, a life without Jaskier in it.

Which meant that he was going to find Yennefer, no matter that he didn’t know where to start right now. He was going to find her, and then he was going to prostrate himself at her feet. Beg her for help like a mangy dog, if that was what was required of him.

He was going to save Jaskier.

No matter what it cost him.

◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊

“Geralt, I had a dream. A wonderful dream.”

Jaskier was so pale. The dark bags under those large, bloodshot eyes had become bottomless shadows that seemed to Geralt to eat into that appealing face. The monstrous thing in Jaskier was eating his friend bit by bit, day by day.

“Melitele came to me. She was—so beautiful. She had a golden halo, and her golden hair floated around her head, and her dress was made of diamonds and moonlight and silk.”

A week. A _week_ was all it took for Jaskier’s belly to burgeon from a mild bulge to an unnatural bloat that strained the buttons and cloth of the bard’s shirt.

“She told me that our baby is going to be a lovely baby boy. That he’s going to have white hair just like yours, and blue eyes just like mine.”

Geralt had seen the black veins spidering across Jaskier’s belly, when Jaskier had taken a bath in the wooden bathtub hours ago. His blood had chilled at the knowledge that Jaskier couldn’t seem to see them. Chilled at the sight of his ailing friend rubbing that swollen belly with an affectionate hand, smiling down at it.

Now, he felt like vomiting as much as Jaskier had for past weeks.

Jaskier actually believed the mother goddess of fertility and birth had spoken to him.

Jaskier actually believed that the fucking monstrous thing that had invaded his body was— _their baby_.

“Isn’t that just _wonderful_ , Geralt? We’re going to start a family.”

Geralt sucked in a shuddering breath. Then another, then another when his hands wouldn’t stop trembling at his sides. He sat down heavily next to Jaskier on the side of the bed. Although he was dressed only in a linen shirt and trousers, he felt as if the whole world was sitting on his slumped shoulders, pulverizing him down to useless dust.

“Jaskier,” he rasped, grasping his friend’s upper arms, refraining from shaking the delusional man hard until these _insane_ notions tumbled out of that precious head. “Listen to me. Please. Cecil fucking Tenebris used blood magic on us. He used blood magic to put a parasite inside your belly, and it’s growing, and it’s _killing_ you.”

Jaskier stared at him with wide, uncomprehending eyes. With a slack face and cracked, parted lips.

“Whatever’s growing inside you is _not our baby_ ,” he growled, glowering at Jaskier, tightening his hands around the bard’s arms. “Do you understand me? It’s a _monster_ , and we have to take it out of you. Now.”

Jaskier’s lips and chin began to quiver. Those wide, bloodshot eyes welled up and glistened in the candlelight.

“You want to kill our baby,” Jaskier whispered wetly. “Our baby boy that Melitele blessed us with.”

Geralt scrunched his eyes shut. He bowed his head, and told himself for the thousandth time to stay resilient, to not _break_. Jaskier needed him. Jaskier needed him more than ever.

“It’s _not_ our baby.” He raised his head and slid his hands up to grasp the sides of Jaskier’s head. He stared into Jaskier’s eyes. “It’s a _parasite_ that a fucked-up sorcerer put inside you. You’re not thinking right, Jaskier. He’s—his blood magic is still influencing your mind. You have to _trust_ me.”

_Please, trust me, my old friend._

_You’re the only one who always has._

But Jaskier was shaking his head, his face crumpling. Jaskier was starting to struggle out of his grasp, and this—this Jaskier was not the Jaskier he knew. This Jaskier was a _perversion_ of his best friend. This Jaskier had no idea what was truly happening to him, had no way of making any logical decisions for himself.

Geralt had to make one for him.

Geralt had to save him.

Right now.

Jaskier let out a high-pitched cry of terror when Geralt shoved him down on the bed with a hand to the chest. Jaskier’s shirt rode up that bulging belly, and Geralt could see the spidering black veins again, could see them _pulsing_ as if they were alive, desecrating Jaskier’s flesh and skin with their corruption.

He couldn’t afford to wait another minute.

He had to cut the monstrous thing out now.

“Stay still. Please, Jaskier,” Geralt said, holding the thrashing man down with one hand flat on his chest. “Stay still. I have to do this. _I have to save you_.”

The strident wail that ripped from Jaskier’s throat reverberated around the inn room. Jaskier wheezed and stared at the glinting weapon in Geralt’s other hand, the short knife he’d whipped out of its sheath hanging from his belt.

“No, don’t, Geralt, please don’t—”

Geralt used his lower legs and weight to restrain Jaskier’s flailing legs. He held the knife away from Jaskier’s grappling hands, not wanting the bard to slice his fingers on the blade.

“I have to, Jaskier! You’re dying!”

He just needed one chance to sink the blade in and cut an opening wide enough for him to yank the fucking parasite _out_ —

“No, no, no, _please_ , Geralt, _please don’t kill our baby!_ ”

Tears kept rolling down Jaskier’s anguished face. He clawed at Geralt’s arms and chest. Pressed his forearms over his swollen belly when Geralt bent his arm back and aimed the tip of the knife at it.

“Please don’t, I beg you,” Jaskier choked out. “Don’t—don’t kill our baby boy. I love him. I love him so much.”

Geralt stared down at his wailing friend. At that appealing, youthful face crumpling again with chest-racking sobs. Every sob pealed in Geralt’s ears like thunder. Every convulsion of Jaskier’s chest under his hand burned him like lightning splintering through his body.

His hand gripping the knife began to tremble. Then his arm followed suit. He sucked in a harsh breath, then another, then another, his eyes searing wet at the edges.

His friend was in pain. So much pain.

And he couldn’t bear to inflict more upon the one he cared for so much.

He hurled the knife away into a corner of the room. The sound it made when its hilt struck the wall sounded like the noise in the left side of his chest, as the hammering thing in there fractured with the same anguish that contorted Jaskier’s pallid, streaked face.

“Please don’t kill him, I love him, I love him.”

Geralt slithered off Jaskier’s limp legs. He pulled Jaskier up into a sitting position on the bed. Pulled the crying man into his arms, then clasped him tight to his hitching chest. He pressed his quivering lower face to Jaskier’s sweat-matted hair, and blinked, and blinked, unable to clear his scalding, scrunched eyes.

“Please don’t kill him,” Jaskier whispered.

Geralt wrapped his hand around Jaskier’s nape. Rubbed a heaving back with his other hand, and ignored the trembling of his hands, his chest.

“I won’t kill him,” Geralt rasped, never hating himself more than he did at this point in time. “I promise.”

“Thank you, Geralt,” Jaskier gasped, clutching at his linen shirt. “Thank you. Thank you.”

Geralt shut his eyes. He rocked them back and forth, and he ignored the trembling of both their bodies. Ignored that horrible, rapid heartbeat in Jaskier’s belly that was drowning Jaskier’s comforting heartbeat.

He didn’t know what to do. He didn’t know what to do to save Jaskier. But he had to, no matter what it cost him—for if he didn’t, he might as well be dead himself.

◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊

Jaskier’s hunger grew in tandem with his belly. Two weeks after the failed attempt to remove the parasite with a knife, Geralt was forced to frequently purchase food from taverns and take the meals out, plates and all, to Jaskier who would wait nearby. Most times, tavern keepers were too scared of his witcher status to object to him taking the meals outside, or couldn’t care less since he always paid first, with gratuity. He felt nothing about splurging Tenebris’s tainted money.

But sometimes, there would be one who would express disapproval. Who would trail after him on the streets, ranting at him for being _witcher scum_ who was _stealing_ the plates despite the gratuity, until he returned to Jaskier’s side.

That was always when the ranting stopped. When the tavern keeper would swing from indignation to quaking fright. Then the man would either stammer nonsense, or yell in a panic, and scarper from them like a rat from a predatory cat.

The one who’d followed him this morning did all three in succession, on top of flailing his skinny arms and tripping on a rock to fall flat on his face.

Jaskier’s blood-red eyes that glowed in the shadow of his cloak’s wide hood had a way of scaring people witless like that.

“By Kreve’s left bollock, you’d think he saw a vampire,” Jaskier mumbled between munches of his many chicken cutlets and pork sausages. “Rude.”

Jaskier’s personality seemed to return whenever he had an ample amount of meat to consume. The more raw it was, the more Jaskier seemed himself after the meal.

Geralt knew it was an illusion. Jaskier wasn’t getting any better. He might sound like himself now and then, might blurt out a quip or even smile like he used to before Murivel, but Jaskier wasn’t getting any better. Jaskier’s condition was worsening: his belly distended so much that he no longer buttoned his doublet or tucked his shirt into his breeches. Those black veins were spreading up Jaskier’s torso to his hairy chest, like the putrescent roots of a grotesque tree.

Yet, Jaskier saw none of this. When Jaskier glanced into a mirror or any other reflective surface, he didn’t see those alarming, blood-red eyes gazing back at him, or that colorless face with such dark shadows under his eyes. Jaskier seemed to see his normal self, with a belly gravid with a human baby boy. A baby he was still convinced was _theirs_.

Geralt didn’t know whether to go down on his knees to weep, or open his mouth and scream in horror and never stop.

He preferred hunting down Cecil Tenebris, and slowly severing each of the despicable fucker’s limbs, and then cutting the fucker open from neck to groin so he would experience what his victims did.

But until Geralt found Yennefer, his retribution was unattainable. No one dared to divulge any new information about Tenebris. Simply asking about the sorcerer in some towns and villages had resulted in him and Jaskier being chased out with actual pitchforks and torches. It hadn’t helped that Jaskier would flip off his cloak’s hood and reveal his frightening eyes and visage while shouting at them to fuck off.

Geralt had to plead with Jaskier to wear the hooded cloak he’d bought in a market ten days ago. If Jaskier didn’t, people would stare at him, at his face and belly, everywhere they went. Even when Jaskier did wear the cloak, Geralt had to persuade him to distance himself from other people for “the sake of their baby’s safety”—and the excuse had worked.

Geralt’s true reason for making Jaskier avoid other people was even more nightmarish: in the bard’s own casual words to Geralt days ago, other people were beginning to look like _fresh meat_ to him. He had said that with a broad, famished smile while seated in the saddle on Roach. While staring at a beefy, shirtless man who was chopping up wood in front of his cottage as they’d traveled past, on the way to another town.

In any other circumstances, Geralt would have raised an eyebrow at Jaskier, and asked him if he had anything in particular to share about his sexual preference. As far as he knew, Jaskier was only interested in women, what with Jaskier’s past courtly reputation, and Jaskier having boasted in Cintra so many years ago that countless lords wanted to murder him for bedding their “wives, concubines, mothers sometimes”—a gloat he’d never quite believed, considering how much Jaskier had adhered to his side for the past twenty years.

But no, a shudder of fear had rocked his spine at the thought that Jaskier would become ravenous enough to attack and _kill_ another human. To _eat_ another human.

Was Tenebris’s blood magic changing Jaskier into—a monster as well? A carnivorous, red-eyed monster constantly craving meat to fill a yawning belly?

Was _that_ what was growing inside Jaskier’s belly?

“Geralt, I’m still hungry.”

A mountain of meat, all gone into Jaskier’s stomach. All gone into the monster growing in that swollen belly.

“We have to go, Jaskier.” Geralt grasped Jaskier’s shoulder and guided him to Roach, helping him to mount the chestnut mare. “That man’s going to tell everyone about your eyes.”

Geralt was grateful that Roach wasn’t reacting badly to how much Jaskier had changed. He doubted that Jaskier could travel on foot for long distances now, and he didn’t want to overtire his ailing friend.

They had to get to Gors Velen. To cross the bridge there to reach Thanedd Island.

“What about my eyes?”

Jaskier was pouting at him. If Jaskier had appeared normal, the pout would have been—cute. But paired with those blood-red eyes and wan cheeks, the pout emphasized how _wrong_ Jaskier appeared now. It was as if Jaskier had become a warped image of himself.

Geralt was losing his best friend.

With each day Yennefer was ignoring his messages he’d left at her usual haunts along their way to Gors Velen, he was one day nearer to losing Jaskier completely. And it would be his own fault, for Yennefer was very likely ignoring him because of his past tactlessness towards her.

Which was why they had to get to Thanedd Island.

To Aretuza.

To the only people left on the Continent who might still be able to save Jaskier.

“Nothing,” Geralt growled in reply, gripping Roach’s reins and guiding her onto the road leading out of the small town. “Forget it. Just keep your cloak and hood on.”

Jaskier rolled his eyes, then muttered, “Fine. It’s keeping me warm, anyway.” Jaskier made a show of shivering. “It’s cold today!”

The mid-morning sun was beating down on them. Geralt was sweating under his armor and linen shirt. His hand tightened around the reins, and he said nothing.

Minutes after they were out of the small town, Jaskier spoke again.

“Geralt, I really am still hungry.”

Geralt was so very grateful for the loose cloak hiding that black-veined, swollen belly from his sight.

“We’ll have lunch soon. I’ll hunt something in the woods.”

He didn’t think a hare or two was going to satiate Jaskier this time. He was going to have to hunt down a deer, if he could find one at all.

To Jaskier’s credit, he didn’t complain anymore until noon, after they traveled past a farm that had a herd of cows grazing in an open field of grass.

“Can we stop now to eat? Please, Geralt? _Please?_ ”

If he didn’t look behind and up at Jaskier, he could almost believe that his friend was fine. That his bard companion was his usual boyish, whining self. That they were just traveling to another town, another city, seeking more adventure and more exciting stories for Jaskier to sing about.

Geralt sighed. They were almost a mile away from the farm. The chances of anyone encountering Jaskier and Roach in the forest while he hunted for hare or deer were minimal, unless another traveller decided to also make a stop here.

“Fine.” He helped Jaskier dismount, then grasped Jaskier’s upper arm with one hand and Roach’s reins with the other. “But stay put while I hunt. Understand?”

Jaskier gave him an enthusiastic nod, and replied, “Of course, Geralt.”

In retrospect, he should have been suspicious of Jaskier’s compliance. He should have been suspicious of how energized Jaskier had abruptly become despite whining about hunger. As if Jaskier was about to do some hunting of his own.

He’d left Jaskier in a narrow clearing with Roach, bringing with him a crossbow and some arrows. He’d lost himself in the primal thrill of the pursuit, in the escalating anticipation when his heightened vision detected a large hare in the undergrowth, unaware of his presence.

Firing an arrow into its flank had been as easy as decapitating that archgriffin in the woods outside of Murivel.

He had reckoned that Jaskier would prefer to have at least one hare to cook and eat now, instead of waiting longer for more. He’d walked back to the narrow clearing, expecting to see his friend seated among the roots of that leafy sycamore tree, and Roach nibbling on grass.

Roach was indeed there, although she wasn’t nibbling on grass. She was agitated. She nickered at him when she saw him.

Jaskier was gone.

His cloak and his lute in its case were all that remained at the foot of the sycamore tree.

“Jaskier,” he said, and no one was around to judge the trepidation lacing through that precious name.

The crossbow and dead hare plummeted from his gloved hands to the ground.

Roach neighed at him, then gestured with a toss of her head to her right. Deeper into the woods—

No. No, not deeper.

Into the woods, parallel to the road.

The opposite direction they’d been traveling today.

“The farm,” Geralt rasped, feeling that gigantic boulder of ice in him once more, smashing his cold insides against the trembling inner walls of his frozen body.

He lost himself in the primal terror of chasing after his bard companion, his best friend, his brother-in-arms. He dashed through the forest, zigzagging between trees, trampling grass, leaves, and shrubs under his boots. From the corner of his eyes, he could see the road to his left through the gaps between the trees, and he used it as his grounded lodestone, tracking its sunlit length.

_Jaskier, my friend._

_Oh, my old friend, what have you done?_

Geralt heard Jaskier’s heartbeat long before he saw the bard. It was pounding so fast and loud, as if he was frightened—or exhilarated. Geralt dashed towards the familiar sound, his breaths scalding in and out of his lungs.

What was Jaskier doing here in this part of the woods? What was Jaskier _doing_ running back to the farm—

The metallic reek of fresh, spilled blood struck Geralt like a blow to the skull. He lurched to a halt at the edge of a round clearing, leaning against the thick trunk of a tree with a forearm braced on it. He panted, and with each sharp inhalation, the metallic reek deluged his nose and immersed itself in his tongue.

He could see the farm beyond the clumps of trees on the other side of the clearing. He could see that open field of cows—and how someone could entice one of those bulky animals with little effort to leave the field and into this clearing. Perhaps with some dried bread. With some cooing, and a waggling hand.

Jaskier had done that.

Jaskier was kneeling next to a cow that lied on its side in the middle of the clearing, facing its underside. Kneeling in its steaming mound of bloody entrails that had spilled out of a long gash from chest to udder.

Jaskier was drenched in the cow’s blood from head to knees.

And Jaskier was—raking and ripping the raw flesh from its black-and-white hide, from its bones with his bare hands, with inhuman strength. Shoveling chunks of that raw flesh into his gaping mouth, and _chewing on it_ and _swallowing it all_.

Geralt gaped at the horrifying, paralyzing tableau. He staggered into the clearing on wobbly legs. He felt his lower lip quivering against his will. He felt bile creeping up his gullet. He tried to suck in a breath, to take another step forward, to _do something_. But he couldn’t. He couldn’t.

“Jaskier,” he croaked.

Jaskier didn’t hear or see him. Jaskier made a snarling sound that should have come from a rabid warg and not a human man, and crammed more raw flesh into his mouth. Geralt almost retched at the squelching noises of Jaskier’s teeth gnawing at the flesh. At the slithery noises of the flesh sliding down Jaskier’s throat.

If it’d been anyone else, anyone but Jaskier, Geralt would have already whipped out his sword.

Charged at the human-shaped monster feasting on the cow it’d just slaughtered.

Decapitated it. Or chopped it in half, and then again, just to make sure it was dead.

But the blood-soaked, red-eyed, swollen-bellied man who finally glanced at him and saw him was no monster. Jaskier was no monster. Jaskier could never be a monster. Jaskier was his bard companion, his best friend, his brother-in-arms.

Jaskier was important to him. More important than anyone else in his life.

“Geralt!” Jaskier bared blood-glazed teeth at him in an euphoric grin. “I’m sorry I didn’t wait for you. I was too hungry.”

Jaskier jammed another chunk of raw flesh into his mouth and munched on it. Geralt staggered nearer to Jaskier on legs that threatened to buckle under him.

“Jaskier, please stop.”

His friend swallowed, then tore out another chunk of raw flesh from the cow’s ribs. Now he saw one of his short knives on the grass near the cow’s head, slathered in blood. Jaskier must have used it to cut the cow open.

“It’s good. Really good.” Jaskier stretched out a bloody arm towards him, offering him a portion of the raw flesh. “Do you want some?”

Geralt didn’t stop himself from collapsing onto his knees on the grass, several feet away from Jaskier. He sat on his heels. Stared at Jaskier with stinging eyes, and shook his head once.

“Eh, more for me, then.” Jaskier stuffed the raw flesh into his mouth and chewed on it. Then, to Geralt’s anguish, Jaskier glanced down at his bulging belly, then smiled at it. At the fucking monstrous thing that had influenced him into committing such a monstrous act. “Sshh, don’t worry. I’m eating enough food for both of us. Daddy will take care of you.”

Geralt’s searing vision was reduced to blobs of colors. It was the tiniest of mercies that he could no longer see the mutilated cow, or his best friend bathed in its blood.

“Jaskier,” he rasped. “Please. No more.”

He blinked hard, and his vision cleared, and now Jaskier was staring at him with wide eyes filled with sincere concern. If not for the blood-red eyes, the cow’s blood, the chunks of its flesh in Jaskier’s loose hands on his lap, Jaskier looked exactly like he had on the riverbank in Rinde so many years ago, when he’d asked Geralt what was going on, what was wrong. When he’d asked Geralt to talk to him, because he’d been worried. Because he’d cared.

Agonizing grooves carved their way down Geralt’s cheeks.

“Geralt.” Jaskier dropped the chunks of raw flesh from his hands, then crawled over the entrails on the ground towards him. “Why are you crying?”

Geralt didn’t know what to say. He stared at Jaskier’s face, past the red, and remembered how blue Jaskier’s eyes truly were. Blue like the cloudless sky above the sea. Blue like the sea itself, with its frothing, rolling waves that had licked their feet while they’d stood side by side on the wet sand.

He stared at the person he cared for so much. The person he loved.

“It’s all right,” Jaskier murmured, sitting on his own heels in front of him. “I’m not so hungry anymore.”

He still didn’t know what to say. He wasn’t sure he could move a muscle.

He wanted to wake up from this nightmare—but he knew it wasn’t one, and that it was a futile wish. Nothing in his nightmares were ever as terrifying as his reality.

“Please don’t cry anymore, Geralt.”

He didn’t flinch when Jaskier raised a blood-drenched hand to his wet cheek. It was far from the first time his skin had been painted with the blood of a slaughtered creature. It wasn’t the first time either that Jaskier had touched his face this way, with such attentiveness. With such love.

His Jaskier was still in there, behind those blood-red eyes, behind the slick coat of cow blood.

His Jaskier could still be saved, if they reached Aretuza in time. If Yennefer decided to heed his entreaties. If the gods listened for once to his prayers, and were merciful to Jaskier.

He reached up and grasped Jaskier’s hand. Pressed it to his cheek.

“We have to go. It’s not safe here for us.”

Jaskier stared at him with those wide, concerned eyes that no monster could ever possess.

“Where are we going?”

Geralt drew down his friend’s hand to his chest and held it with both hands.

“Do you trust me, Jaskier?” He stared past the blood-red, and remembered the beautiful blue of Jaskier’s eyes. “Do you trust me?”

Jaskier said nothing. But he gave Geralt a firm nod, and it was as good as any word the bard could have sung or uttered to him.

◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊

Two days later, Geralt still hadn’t received any response from Yennefer.

He and Jaskier didn’t reach Gors Velen in time.

They were on the open road once more under an overcast sky, hours away from Vallweir, when Jaskier lamented about pain emanating from his bulging belly. At first, Geralt thought that Jaskier was just hungry again, whining again about the deer he had for breakfast and why Geralt had bothered to roast it on a spit when he could have eaten it _raw_.

Then Jaskier hunched forward in the saddle. He groaned, and clutched at his belly with both hands over the folds of his cloak.

“Jaskier?”

Geralt halted Roach in her tracks with a mild tug on her reins. He strode to Roach’s side, and grasped Jaskier’s knee with a gloved hand. The hood of the cloak was down, pooling around Jaskier’s drooping shoulders. Jaskier’s face was scrunched up with blatant, genuine pain.

“Geralt, it hurts.”

Without thinking, Geralt reached up and pressed his hand to Jaskier’s belly, below Jaskier’s hands. Even through his glove, through the thick material of the cloak, through Jaskier’s shirt, he felt something _writhe_ under his palm.

He yanked his hand away as if it’d been dipped in flames.

“Geralt,” Jaskier gasped, his blood-red eyes wide and watering. “Geralt—I think—our baby’s coming.”

The rapturous smile that spread across Jaskier’s wan face shouldn’t have mauled Geralt’s heart like it did. If Jaskier had been fine, that smile would have stolen his breath. Would have stolen the thing in the left side of his chest that now bled and bled from its core-deep gouges.

He needed to find shelter for Jaskier.

He needed to find an isolated location, where no one was going to hear Jaskier scream while he did what he should have done weeks ago.

He swung himself up into the saddle behind Jaskier. Roach accepted his weight with grace, and didn’t neigh at him for the sore back she was going to suffer later. She knew the situation was taking a turn for the worse. She knew he would never do this unless it was life or death—like he had swung Jaskier onto her back behind him after the djinn had attacked the bard on the riverbank in Rinde a lifetime ago.

Jaskier was going to die.

Jaskier was going to die unless he cut the fucking monstrous thing out of him first.

“Hold onto the saddle,” Geralt growled into Jaskier’s ear, rearranging them as best he could to take control of Roach and _ride_. “And to me.”

He wrapped his arm around Jaskier’s chest and gripped Jaskier’s shoulder, pulling his friend tight to him. He felt more than heard Jaskier panting and whimpering from another wave of pain. Roach knew him so well that she recognized the instant she had to gallop with nary a tug on her reins.

He didn’t know where to go. He didn’t know what there was to find along this lonely stretch of road flanked by towering trees and undergrowth, but he had to keep Roach going, keep going until he did.

Jaskier needed him. Jaskier needed him now, more than ever.

Thunder rolled across the darkening clouds above them.

Roach saw the farmhouse and its barn before Geralt did, and veered smoothly towards them. The old buildings stood on a vast piece of cleared land to the left of the road, next to a rocky stream. Those were the only details he bothered to assimilate.

The barn.

That was where they had to go. Where their last stand was going to transpire.

The sky was grey-black when Roach ambled to a stop in front of the barn with its sloping, triangular roof. Each of Jaskier’s breaths were now ending in a high-pitched whine, and he was clutching at Geralt’s forearm, scratching at it.

“You’ll be okay, Jaskier.”

He tried to believe that himself as he swiftly dismounted and then helped Jaskier down. Jaskier toppled sideways into his arms, then groaned in more pain after his feet hit the ground, grabbing at Geralt’s black shirt with one hand, his swollen belly with the other. Geralt tugged one of Jaskier’s shaking arms across his shoulders. Wrapped an arm around his friend’s lower back.

“Oh gods, Geralt, it—fuck, it really _hurts_.”

Geralt carried more than dragged Jaskier into the barn after kicking open its flimsy, wooden double doors. He was relieved to see there were no animals in it. Just piles of hay allocated to the sides of the barn. He laid Jaskier down on a heap of hay on the right side, nearer to the back of the building. He stripped off Jaskier’s cloak.

Jaskier was in agony now, squirming on the hay and wailing. Geralt couldn’t comprehend how the pain could escalate so much in so little time, but this was no ordinary _pregnancy_. This was no pregnancy in any way. This was the violent invasion of a monstrous parasite into Jaskier’s body, and its occupation of said body to develop its own, until it—

“Geralt,” Jaskier rasped. “Geralt.”

The blood-red was draining from Jaskier’s eyes, like a fog being blown away. They were becoming blue again.

“Jaskier.” Geralt dropped onto his knees next to his hurting friend. Leaned down and carded his hand through that dark, medium-length hair, cupping a lightly stubbled cheek. “Jaskier, stay with me. Look at me. Stay with me.”

“Geralt,” Jaskier whispered. He gasped for air. Stared up at Geralt, and didn’t blink as tears welled up in those beautiful blue eyes and spilled from them. “I’m scared.”

“I know.” Geralt swallowed hard, carding his fingers through Jaskier’s hair again. “I know. So am I.”

“What’s happening to me?”

No, _no_ , the blood-red was returning to those beautiful blue eyes again—

“I’m going to save you, Jaskier. You’re going to be all right. You’re going to be—”

Jaskier’s face contorted with more agony. He threw back his head on the hay and screamed, thrashing around, tensing his arms and kicking his legs. For a few seconds, Geralt could merely sit back on his heels and stare at Jaskier’s belly after the loose shirt covering it rode up its swell.

It was encrusted with black, pulsing veins from flank to flank. It undulated as the monstrous thing inside it pushed against its fleshy confines with its head and elbows and knees.

Geralt could see that—because the skin of Jaskier’s belly had become translucent between the black veins.

He could _see_ the fucking monstrous thing that was killing his best friend: it looked human only in the sense that it had a head, two arms, and two legs. Its skin was as blood-red as Jaskier’s wide eyes were again. It had no face. But it had numerous eyes of various sizes all over its head and body.

They were all amber in color.

They were staring back at him through the translucent skin.

Geralt couldn’t hear Jaskier screaming anymore, or hear the heels of Jaskier’s leather boots knocking on the dirt floor while Jaskier kept thrashing on the hay. A shrill humming sound penetrated his ears and clogged his skull, frying his mind like a lightning bolt. A sound that heralded the end of his world.

Time slowed to a chilling, deafening crawl.

Geralt turned his head towards the open doors of the barn. It felt as if it took him a century to do so.

A black-haired man of ample build in a tunic, trousers, and boots was standing inside the barn, framed by the rectangular doorway. He was scowling and yelling at Geralt, but Geralt heard nothing but the shrill humming sound.

Then slowly, slowly, the farmer’s scowl gave way like an avalanche of snow to an open-mouthed, wide-eyed expression of pure horror. He was staring at Jaskier. His eyes widened more and more as he stumbled back and raised his arms in a protective stance. His mouth gaped open to scream, and scream.

Geralt turned his head back to look at Jaskier.

His vision was doused in the bright crimson of blood. A scorching torrent of it splashed his whole face, his neck, his torso. It spattered the insides of his mouth, his teeth, his tongue. Its metallic reek pervaded his nose and throat.

He couldn’t see anything, he couldn’t hear anything but that blasted humming sound, he couldn’t smell anything but blood, whose blood was this, _whose blood was this_ —

He scrambled backward on his hands and heels across the dirt floor. Every harsh breath he took made him gag, made him want to vomit everything in his guts. He swiped at his eyes with a gloved hand. Swiped at them again and again until he could open his eyes and not see crimson.

His black glove was slathered with blood.

His armor, his shirt, even the top of his trousers were saturated with blood.

Whose blood was this? _Whose fucking blood was this?_

Geralt sat on the dirt floor with his legs bent up in front of him, his shaking arm propping him upright. His other arm shook as hard as it hovered in front of his chest heaving with panicked breaths he couldn’t hear.

He looked at Jaskier.

Jaskier wasn’t thrashing on the hay anymore. Jaskier was sprawled on it, his upper body and arms twitching like a dissected, dying insect. Jaskier’s eyes were rolled up in his head and half-open. Blood splattered his colorless face up to the forehead. More blood drenched his torn shirt, his open doublet, his breeches down to the thighs.

His belly wasn’t swollen anymore. It was a gory, mangled mess of ruptured skin and sundered flesh from below the sternum to the lower belly.

A blood-coated, long-limbed monster was crawling out of it.

Geralt stared at the monster as it tumbled onto its side on the dirt floor next to Jaskier’s motionless feet. It truly had no face on its small, round head. Its flailing arms were far longer than its legs, capped with clawed, skinny fingers. Its kicking legs were bent at the knees like an animal’s. Its numerous eyes rolled in different directions, unfocused, yet wide with bestial madness.

The shrill humming noise was still all he could hear.

_Jaskier, you’re going to be—_

_Jaskier._

_I’m scared._

The monster crawled away from Jaskier, then clambered onto its clawed feet in the middle of the barn. Its fingers grazed the dirt floor as it slowly stood upright, its back hunched, its numerous amber eyes rolling and rolling, hunting for prey. Then it grew in seconds—bigger and bigger, elongating its blood-red body and limbs with squelching noises, until it towered at least seven feet tall with its back still hunched.

Its numerous amber eyes rolled in unison to focus on Geralt.

In the spaces between its eyes, fangs sprouted into sight, yawning open into ravenous mouths.

Then, with a pop like a needle through his ears, Geralt could hear other sounds again. He could hear the horror-stricken farmer screaming and screaming while he cowered against one of the barn doors. He could hear the monster’s innumerable teeth clicking. Hear its hungry snarl disgorging from all those mouths.

Time froze—then surged to the opposite extreme, quickening as the monster launched itself at the farmer.

Geralt leapt to his feet and whipped out his sword from its sheath on his back.

Even with all his witcher abilities and speed, the farmer had no chance of survival: the monster seized the screaming farmer with its clawed hands and crushed him to its spindly body. Those fangs ravaged whatever flesh they could reach to the bone in seconds. A clawed hand prised the farmer’s head off its neck like a ripe grape off a stem and hurled it outside. Blood spouted from the tattered neck to bathe the monster.

With an ear-splitting roar, Geralt lunged at the monster and thrust his sword through its back and out its chest. It let out a horrendous scream that sounded like a wailing baby in the throes of death. It dropped the farmer’s mutilated corpse to the dirt floor.

He yanked out his sword and skewered the fucking monster in the chest again, his own bloody teeth bared in an enraged snarl at the even louder scream it released. He yanked out his sword again. Staggered back from the monster as it collapsed in a heap onto the farmer’s corpse, its numerous eyes rolling wildly in their sockets, its fangs gnashing at nothing.

He staggered back a few more steps. Wheezed for air, his blood-smeared sword dragging by the tip across the dirt floor.

He swiveled around on precarious legs—and saw that Jaskier was conscious.

Jaskier was staring at him with wet, wide eyes that glimmered between blood-red and blue. Tears ran in rivulets down Jaskier’s blood-splattered cheeks.

Jaskier’s colorless lips were moving.

“You—you ki-killed our baby,” Jaskier whispered. “But—you promised.”

Soaked in Jaskier’s blood from head to thighs, Geralt stared back at his dying friend, his lips quivering. He felt something deep in his chest fracture then shatter like glass under a sledgehammer. He smelled Jaskier’s blood, and tasted it on his tongue, and it occurred to him then that perhaps this was the closest he would ever be again to the one he loved.

_I’m sorry, Jaskier._

_I’m so sorry, my love._

But he didn’t know what he was sorry for.

Clicking noises behind him were his sole warning, one too late. He swiveled back to confront the monster, and the swift move saved him from being decapitated by long claws. The claws sliced through the shoulder belts attached to his shoulder armor panels. They raked across the chainmail of his body armor—and the impact of that was powerful enough to send him flying across the length of the barn, his sword spinning through the air from his grip.

He landed hard on his upper back. Rolled a few times across the dirt floor to come to a dazed rest on a pile of hay.

The monster pounced on him in a split second.

His body armor saved him a second time when it tried to maim his chest with its claws. As it raised its arm high in the air above his head, it dawned on him that he was going to die. That a fucking monstrous parasite that had grown inside Jaskier and then _exploded out of his belly_ was going to butcher him and devour him.

_I’m so sorry, Jaskier. I should have asked you when I had the chance. I should have asked you what pleased you, who pleased you._

_Because you please me. Because you’re important to me. More than anyone else in my life._

_Always._

Jaskier’s eyes were shut. Jaskier’s lips weren’t moving anymore. Jaskier’s blood wasn’t spreading in a pool across the dirt floor anymore.

Geralt couldn’t hear Jaskier’s heartbeat anymore.

“Fuck you,” he snarled at the monster with the mockeries of his eyes.

He refused to shut his eyes, and glared up in defiance at the embodiment of death.

_Fuck you, you fucking despicable piece of shit. Kill me already, and let me join him in the afterlife._

_Let me be happy at last._

In the moment when the monster should have swung its arm down to rip his head off his neck, it went rigid. Its small head twitched on its slim neck. It lowered his arm and its innumerable eyes gazed at its own chest. It tottered backward, away from Geralt, still staring at its own chest.

At the purple flame that was igniting inside it.

Geralt sat up on the hay. He stared in stunned silence as the purple flame erupted into an inferno that engulfed the screaming monster. The monster lurched from one side of the barn to the other, flailing its elongated arms and tossing its head in a frenzy, in a vain effort to extinguish the magical flames. The fire didn’t burn the hay or the wooden structure of the barn.

He couldn’t smell Jaskier’s blood anymore. He smelled lilac and gooseberry.

Thunder boomed overhead, a startling drum of war that proclaimed the presence of a ravishing, tall woman with wavy, dark hair in a furred coat. A sorceress with glowing violet eyes, standing in the rectangular doorway of the barn.

A blinding flash of lightning lit Yennefer from behind. In the shadows, her wide eyes were ablaze with disgust and fury at the burning monster.

It saw her. Still screaming, it hurtled towards her, its arms stretched out to seize her and kill her.

She stood in place, undaunted, indomitable. She raised a hand with its palm out towards it, baring her teeth in a snarl worthy of a fearsome wolf. Her wide eyes glowed brighter. Her hair floated around her head from her tremendous magical power radiating from her being.

The monstrous parasite had no chance of survival in the dazzling incandescence of her merciless wrath.

The purple flames that engulfed it erupted into a fiery pillar that slammed into the roof of the barn and rippled out. Geralt was flung back against the pile of hay from the shockwave. He shielded his eyes with his forearm from the heated glare.

He heard the now silent monster collapse onto the dirt ground with a heavy thud. He lowered his arm to see the monster burning and burning, a blackened mass in shrinking purple flames, a vile oblation at the feet of its executioner.

Yennefer stared at him with stricken eyes that no longer glowed. At his face that was drenched in Jaskier’s blood.

He didn’t know what to say. He didn’t know what to do.

That boulder of ice within him had replaced his insides. His blood had become icy rivers in his veins, freezing his hands and feet, and Jaskier’s blood all over his face, his neck, his body scalded him like fire.

He couldn’t hear Jaskier’s comforting heartbeat anymore.

That shrill humming sound had returned to drown his whole world in wet crimson, in lightning flashes.

His wide eyes followed Yennefer as she darted to Jaskier’s side and knelt on the hay. He stared at her holding her hands palms down above the grisly mess that used to be Jaskier’s belly. Her violet eyes glowed once more.

Jaskier’s exposed innards began to glow with a similar color.

Yennefer was healing him. Saving him.

Yennefer was saving Geralt too.

His joints creaked when he moved. He left bloody prints on the dirt floor as he crawled on trembling limbs to Jaskier and Yennefer. He sat heavily on his heels at Jaskier’s side. He stared down at Jaskier’s ashen face, at the blood on it that should be inside Jaskier’s precious body, pumping through that big, doting heart, keeping that eloquent, vibrant soul alive.

_Jaskier, you’re going to be all right. You don’t have to be scared anymore._

_Look at me._

_Jaskier, stay with me._

But Jaskier’s eyes were shut. Jaskier’s lips didn’t move. Jaskier’s bright blood trickled from the corner of those lips to join its dried brethren on pallid skin.

Geralt stared down at the ghostly face of the one he loved, the one he would always love even when the gods wouldn’t, and listened to the sound of his whole world ending.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please don't reach through the screen to kill me. I know it seems so impossible right now, but the "angst with a happy ending" tag is for reals!
> 
> In Part II: Geralt contends with the life-changing aftermath of the traumatic events in the barn. Geralt must make a terrible choice to save Jaskier again, no matter how much it costs him or how much it will hurt him ...
> 
> ______________________________________
> 
> Other potential triggers in Part I not tagged: The sorcerer assaults Geralt and Jaskier with blood magic, and violates Jaskier's body by using his corrupted magical blood to implant a monstrous parasite in him. Geralt restrains a crying, delusional Jaskier and tries to cut the parasite out of him. A mind-manipulated, deteriorating Jaskier kills and mutilates a cow, and devours its raw flesh. Jaskier suffers extreme physical injury when the monster rips out of him ala Alien (1979). Poor farmer gets violently murdered by said monster.


	2. PART II

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for your kind comments, kudos, bookmarks, and subscriptions! I appreciate them all. 🙂 I hope you'll enjoy this update as well.
> 
> Writing Part II of this story took a brutal bite out of me. At a whoopin' 22,000+ words, this is a feast of epic Geralt angst--and I strongly recommend readers to proceed with caution if you suffer from depression, suicidal tendencies, etc. Geralt goes through immense emotional and psychological anguish here on top of PTSD and even more traumatic experiences. 
> 
> Again, I did not warn for everything in the tags to avoid spoiling readers, so if you want to know the other potentially triggering stuff in Part II, they're listed in the end notes. Do note they're very spoilerish for certain events!
> 
> I'm already powering through Part III to the finish line, so the next and last update will be faster. 
> 
> Soundtracks: 
> 
> [Sicario OST - Alejandro’s Song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLGEMHvWU3U) (for the first section)  
> [Joker OST - Young Penny](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpfUA2bG6yY) (overall track, but especially for the second last section)  
> [Joker OST - Defeated Clown](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vyiV8KVqajM) (for the confrontation with Tenebris)  
> [Braveheart OST - For the Love of a Princess (harp)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxNhUgr6LTM) (for the last section)
> 
> Here be more blood and monsters and pain. This is an apt image of what Geralt is like inside and out in this update, except he'd also be splattered with Jaskier's blood from head to thighs:

Geralt could hear Jaskier’s heartbeat again, but it wasn’t a sound that comforted him. It was slow. It fluctuated. It was not the heartbeat of a man. It was the heartbeat of a little bird in the skeletal jaws of death, its blood bathing those jaws, its flesh shredded to strips between clicking teeth.

Jaskier was as light as a little bird in his arms. Jaskier’s blood-splattered face was as cold as ice against his neck.

“Geralt, what the fuck happened?”

He was there in his blood-drenched body that trudged down the beaten path of soil to the farmhouse, and yet he wasn’t. He felt as if he was drifting outside of his body, as if someone or something else was controlling him like a puppet on strings with no volition of his own. He felt, as if through a wall a dozen feet thick, his boots treading the earth one at a time, his gloved hands clutching onto Jaskier’s upper arm and thigh.

He didn’t know what to say to Yennefer. He didn’t know what to do, except carry Jaskier in his arms, and take one step forward, then another. Then another. Then another. Another.

His hands and feet were blocks of ice as heavy as the world and its apathy. His blood was a frozen river in his veins, and Jaskier’s scalding blood on him did nothing to thaw him. He couldn’t smell the burnt, rotten stench of the monster anymore. Jaskier’s blood was all he could smell and taste.

“Geralt.”

Yennefer walked beside him, but didn’t touch him. He wouldn’t have felt it anyway, not through that dozen feet-thick wall that enclosed him, not through Jaskier’s drying blood on his face.

He didn’t know what to say to her.

He didn’t know where his voice had gone. He didn’t know where his own heartbeat had gone.

He could hear Jaskier’s heartbeat again, and that was what mattered.

The sky above them was no longer grey-black. It was a blank, endless expanse of white, leeched of light and rain. Thunder that had boomed overhead now rumbled miles and miles away, as if it was the agitated mumbling of a child in the throes of a nightmare.

If the gods were choosing to speak now through that thunder, Geralt was deaf to them, like they were deaf to him and his hollow prayers.

The farmhouse’s front door was open. He trudged through it first, angling his body so Jaskier’s limp lower legs didn’t knock against the doorframe. There was a narrow, straight staircase to the left. Its rickety steps creaked under his boots.

A narrow landing at the top. A turn to the right, into a passageway with a window at the end of it. A room to the left, its door half open—the farmer’s bedroom.

The farmer. The poor bastard, still screaming and screaming in Geralt’s mind, dead and still so terrified. Another innocent victim in Cecil Tenebris’s sick game.

Geralt carefully laid Jaskier on the sole bed in the room. It was a bed big enough for two adults, but it was evident that the farmer had lived alone: there was only one pillow on the bed, and the open wooden chest at the foot of the bed contained the clothing of a man, but none for a woman. If he’d been married, his wife would have been home as well. She would have surely dashed to the barn after hearing her husband screaming in such terror.

She would have also been murdered by the monster.

Vain mercy, then, that the farmer had been alone. That no one else had to die today.

“Geralt. You have to let him go.”

Yennefer, speaking to him again. Yennefer, sitting on the side of the bed, digging her fingers into his right shoulder. His shoulder armor panels were gone. They were—in the barn. With the corpses.

Jaskier was not there. Jaskier was here.

Jaskier was not a corpse.

Geralt stared at Yennefer. Then he turned his head and stared down at Jaskier. His left arm was still wrapped around Jaskier’s shoulders. Jaskier’s head was resting against his chest, over his scored body armor. Jaskier’s eyes were still shut, and his lightly stubbled face was still colorless, save for the dried blood that splattered it up to that high forehead. More blood matted Jaskier’s dark, medium-length hair.

But Geralt could hear Jaskier’s heartbeat.

He could hear it.

“Geralt.” Yennefer’s fingers dug deeper into his shoulder, but they felt as if they were burrowing into someone else’s flesh. “You have to lay him down so I can continue healing him.”

Limbs on strings. A puppet of ice, a tremulous breath away from shattering into shards to melt away into nothing.

He obeyed her.

A blink of his sore eyes, and he was standing next to the bed, watching her hold her hands palms down over Jaskier’s ravaged belly. The grievous wounds were smaller now, being stitched together by Yennefer’s magic into dark, ragged scars on blood-smeared, pale skin.

Her violet eyes were glowing again. There were dark shadows of exhaustion under them.

Geralt stared at Jaskier’s exposed innards that also glowed violet.

He tasted Jaskier’s blood on his tongue.

He now knew what Jaskier’s insides tasted like, and he always would.

“I have to bury the farmer,” he heard someone say in a cracked, guttural voice.

He didn’t know who it was. He didn’t recognize the poor bastard who sounded as if he’d been truly pulverized to useless dust, to dead ashes.

Yennefer glanced up at him. She stared at his face with those stricken eyes, and he didn’t understand why. He wasn’t the one dying. He wasn’t the one whose belly was ripped open by a fucking monstrous thing with _his eyes_ and had been mind-fucked by its equally fucking monstrous creator into believing that _thing_ was his _baby_.

Jaskier’s eyes were still shut. Jaskier was on his back, his legs straight, his left arm bent outward on the bed, his right arm folded in two against his side and his right hand resting on his chest. His once pristine clothes were frayed, stained with his own blood, and through the rips of that familiar beige shirt, Geralt saw a hirsute chest without any of those black, pulsing veins.

The disgusting black veins were completely gone from Jaskier’s body.

But Jaskier’s eyes were still shut—and Geralt didn’t know if they were going to be beautiful blue. Or blood-red, like Tenebris’s eyes that fateful day in Murivel.

_You aren’t just a failure at being a witcher. You’re a bloody failure at being any sort of man, aren’t you?_

_It’s all right, Geralt of Rivia._

_It’s all right. I’ll make you see what you really are._

He turned around and trudged out of the room. He trudged down the passageway. Down the stairs, then out the open front door.

He trudged down the beaten path of soil to the barn.

He passed the farmer’s decapitated head, but he didn’t halt to pick it off the grass. The farmer’s greyed, open eyes stared at him, and screamed and screamed in his mind.

Inside the barn, the farmer’s mutilated corpse sprawled in a pool of blood on the dirt floor where it’d fallen near the barn’s open doors. Geralt stood at its feet and stared at it. He thought it was funny how everyone became mere chunks of bone and flesh in death, how easily a man could be a breathing, living being in one minute and then chewed-up, chopped-up meat in the next.

He heard a peculiar sound echo around the barn, a sound akin to a hysterical chuckle and a harsh sob combined. He didn’t know where the sound had come from. He was the only thing here capable of making any sounds.

He stared at the farming tools leaning in a bundle in the corner of the barn. Two rakes. A pitchfork, a spade. A shovel. An axe.

Everything was quiet again.

He trudged over to the charred corpse of the monster in the heart of the barn. It was a wretched ghost of itself. Its numerous eyes were gone, leaving behind empty sockets that were pits in a dark grey husk. The monster had died in a fetal position, its back hunched, its elongated limbs folded beneath its spindly body.

Without those eyes, without those clicking fangs, it appeared almost human.

An ear-splitting roar of rage echoed in the wake of Geralt’s foot slamming in a vicious kick into the charred corpse. It exploded into desiccated chunks and ashes that scattered far and wide across the dirt floor. The monster’s round, small head flew through the air and cracked into multiple pieces upon impact on the floor.

In its wreckage, Geralt saw what looked like the black, viscous remains of—a brain.

It had a brain. It had a _mind_ that had processed thoughts, that had controlled that blood-red, deformed body that had grown inside Jaskier’s belly and then warped his best friend beyond recognition and then—and then he—

He could taste Jaskier’s blood in his mouth, on his tongue.

He could taste the blood that had coated the monster when it’d clawed its way out of Jaskier’s belly.

He could—

He was on his hands and knees outside the barn. His torso quaked as he vomited a sickly, sour mixture of bile and blood onto the ground. He couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t see past the searing tears that had sprung up in his eyes.

He couldn’t get the taste of the monster out of his mouth, his body.

But he—he was a monster.

He was a monster, too. He was a monster that only another monster could ever see, and know.

He saw what he really was, now.

Another ear-splitting roar echoed around him, deadening the distant rumble of thunder, the worthless chatter of worthless gods. It fulminated with more rage, with so much more torment. He sat on his heels on the ground, his palms pressed to his temples, his fingers clenching in his hair, his eyes scrunched shut. He rocked back and forth, and he didn’t know why, and he couldn’t stop it. Yet another ear-splitting roar of utter torment echoed around him—and it took him forever to realize that it was ripping itself out of his lungs, his gaping mouth.

It took him forever to stop rocking. To not feel those agonizing, wet grooves carve down his cheeks anymore.

Eventually, he stood up on quivering legs. He felt as if he was drifting outside of his trembling body again, as if he was a puppet of ice melting into black sludge, alone in a shell a hundred feet thick. It was very cold and dark where he was within himself. It was a place a thing like him belonged.

He retrieved the farmer’s head. It dangled from his fingers, from its black, short hair. Those greyed, open eyes couldn’t stare at him this way. He also retrieved the farmer’s corpse, dragging it out of the barn by fisting his other hand in the farmer’s tunic.

It left a wide trail of barren blood in its tracks.

The shovel. He had to get the shovel.

He dropped the farmer’s head and corpse on the beaten path. He trudged back to the barn to get the shovel.

He picked a spot between the barn and farmhouse, that had a nice view of the rocky stream nearby. The farmer would probably like that. He wouldn’t want to be buried near the spot where he’d been brutally murdered by a monstrous thing with monstrous eyes.

It took Geralt an hour to dig a grave four feet deep in the farm soil. He didn’t know where the energy to do it came from, but he was grateful for it. The toil erased all thoughts from his mind. The incessant, repetitive motions hypnotized him into an open-eyed stupor in which he felt nothing but the cold.

Dig in. Lift. Toss the soil to one side. Dig in. Lift. Toss the soil to one side. Dig in. Lift. Toss the soil to one side. Dig in. Lift. Toss the soil to one side.

Dig his fingers into cold, hard flesh.

Lift the ample corpse.

Toss it into the grave.

He was kinder with the decapitated head. He didn’t look at its face, at the permanent terror etched on it as he skimmed his blood-stained, gloved hand over those greyed eyes. He placed it face up above the bloody stump of the corpse’s neck. He could almost convince himself the farmer was asleep, if not for the myriad of bite wounds all over the body, many deep to the bone.

It was even easier to toss the soil back into the grave, over the corpse. Soon, all he could see was a rectangular patch of disturbed soil tamped down with the shovel, a patch of ground that anyone could walk over without a second thought.

A marker. Every grave needed a marker.

He trudged back to the barn, gripping the shovel by its shaft. He dropped the shovel on the dirt floor and picked out the pitchfork from the corner of the barn. He trudged back to the grave, then stuck the pitchfork tines down into the soil at the head of the grave until the metal fork was buried, leaving the wooden handle above ground.

He didn’t know the farmer’s name. He would never know what it was.

He stood at the foot of the grave for a while, and although he wanted to say something, his lips couldn’t move. His mouth was dry and sour with the lingering odor of vomit. He could still smell Jaskier’s blood that smothered his face and saturated his clothes.

_I’m sorry._

_I failed to save you._

His gloves made a squelching noise when he clenched his hands into fists at his sides. He squeezed his eyes shut, squeezed his lips together, and he didn’t know who those words were for—the dead farmer, or the little bird still in the skeletal jaws of death now in a tug of war with a sorceress who hated to lose.

Death was patient. Death outlasted everyone and everything. Death always won, in the end.

_Jaskier._

_Jaskier, I’m—_

Now Geralt was naked in the rocky stream. He was sitting chest deep in the chilly, flowing water, his legs folded up to his chest, his hands clutching his knees. His armor and clothes were in a pile near the bank of the stream. He didn’t recall how he ended up here.

Jaskier’s blood still streaked his arms. Jaskier’s blood still smothered his face.

He could still taste Jaskier’s blood between his teeth.

He plunged his arms into the water. He rubbed at them from wrist to shoulder, again, and again, and again. He splashed the water against his face and rubbed at it from forehead to chin. He yanked at the tie fastening his hair in its half-up, half-down ponytail style, then rolled forward to plunge his whole head into the stream, shaking his head from side to side.

When he sat up and raised his head above the surface, he glanced down and saw his own reflection in the red water. He saw wide amber eyes staring back at him. He saw bared teeth, and heard them clicking, over and over.

He pressed his shaking hands to his face, over his eyes. He could still smell Jaskier’s blood. He could still feel it on his face, his neck. His chest. His arms. Everywhere.

He rubbed at his skin with his hands. Scratched at it with his fingers.

Again, and again, and again, and again.

“Geralt. Stop it.”

He scratched at his arms again. He could see the blood still clinging to his skin, following his fingernails. Why couldn’t Yennefer see that? Why couldn’t she understand that he had to scrape it all away? It was _everywhere_ —

“Geralt, _stop it_.”

She was kneeling in the stream. She was wearing a black, high-collared, long-sleeved dress that puffed up around her in the water. Her furred coat was gone. Her dark, wavy hair fluttered in the wind.

She was gripping his wrists.

She was gripping his wrists in her slender hands and he—couldn’t break out of them. He—he was very cold. His hands were shaking. The edges of his fingernails were red.

“I—I can still feel—I can still _feel it_ on my—”

Who was that? Who was that poor bastard with that cracked, guttural voice?

“It’s gone. It’s all gone, Geralt.” Yennefer’s violet eyes were glistening. “You’re clean.”

Geralt stared back at her. He shivered. He felt warm blood trickle down his forearms from the fresh grooves that—that he had scratched into them.

Oh, he was that poor bastard.

He was that poor bastard who’d been damned and defiled from the beginning of his existence. So defiled that his own mother had realized that and shed him like old blood from her womb, putrid the instant it vacated her body.

He had never been clean.

He would never be clean.

“ _Geralt_.” She shook his wrists hard, glaring into his wide eyes. “Jaskier needs you. Do you hear me?”

He stared at her. He felt warm blood dripping off his elbows into the chilly water. He felt more warmth running down his cheeks.

She shook his wrists again. The clear water of the stream flowed past them, and he wondered what would happen to the fishes that swam in his blood and Jaskier’s, to the creatures that sipped the tainted water and made something monstrous a part of themselves.

“Jaskier needs you,” Yennefer growled. “Now.”

Geralt blinked. He stared down at her hands around his wrists. At the edges of her fingernails turning red from his tainted blood.

Jaskier.

Jaskier, his old friend, his loyal lark. Jaskier, the one he loved.

Jaskier, who still lived, who needed him.

_Jaskier, you’re going to be all right. You don’t have to be scared anymore._

_You can open your eyes now._

Geralt was in the farmer’s bedroom again, on his knees beside the bed, in a clean shirt and trousers that did not belong to him. He didn’t recall how he ended up here, and he didn’t care. He grasped a damp, white cloth in his right hand. He gently wiped the dried blood off Jaskier’s pallid, slack face with the cloth. He was drifting outside of his body yet again, and he watched his own hand move the reddening cloth down Jaskier’s neck, across that hirsute, lean chest that barely rose and fell with shallow breaths.

Jaskier’s frayed shirt was gone, and so was the blood-soaked doublet. Jaskier was naked apart from the bandages that swathed his torso from sternum to lower belly.

The red, wet cloth sopped up more blood from Jaskier’s arms, from his lower body.

Geralt could still hear Jaskier’s heartbeat. Jaskier was still alive.

That was all that mattered.

“Geralt.”

Now he was sitting on his bare heels on the wooden floor, facing the bed. The wet cloth was no longer in his hand. Jaskier was tucked under a thick, woolen blanket up to the neck. Jaskier’s eyes were still shut, but all that blood was gone, and Geralt could see his best friend’s appealing face once more, wan as it was.

He could almost convince himself that Jaskier was asleep. That Jaskier had a long, exhausting day on the open road, and simply needed a good night’s rest.

He could still hear the farmer screaming and screaming.

He could still hear those fangs gnawing into the poor bastard’s flesh to the bone.

He could still hear the monster’s child-like screams as he rammed his sword through its chest.

“Geralt, tell me what the fuck happened here.”

Yennefer was sitting on the floor next to him, leaning back against the bed. Staring at his face with those violet eyes that gleamed with something rare. Something akin to compassion.

He could still taste Jaskier’s blood in the back of his throat. Smell it high up in his nose.

But he obeyed her.

He told her, in that cracked, guttural voice, about his and Jaskier’s fateful stay in Murivel. About Cecil Tenebris, and his blood magic, and how the fucking despicable sorcerer had used it to harm Jaskier in the worst ways.

Because of him.

“Fucking hell,” she whispered.

She was staring at him with those stricken eyes again, bogged down by those dark shadows of exhaustion from hours of magic usage. He could see, in the roundness of those eyes, in her frozen pose, that she knew who Tenebris was, and what he was capable of doing to others. She had witnessed that for herself in the barn today. Had slayed Tenebris’s corrupted, monstrous progeny with her magic after sharpened steel had failed.

“Bloody fucking hell, Geralt.” She slumped against the bed, arching her head back on a long neck to stare sightlessly at the ceiling. Her face was blank. “Of all the sick fuckers on the Continent. _Him_.”

Geralt stared on at Jaskier’s face. He listened on to Jaskier’s heartbeat, slow as it was in the deep healing slumber Yennefer had placed him. There was only Jaskier’s heartbeat now in that precious body.

He breathed in tandem with Jaskier.

He breathed.

“He’s lost a great deal of blood. There’s only so much I can do. The rest is up to him now.” She also stared at Jaskier. She rested one of her hands on a blanket-covered shin. “I’m—” She focused her eyes on Geralt’s face, and he felt them like flickering flames on his skin. “I’m sorry. I only got your messages days ago. You didn’t explain why you needed to see me, so I—” Her eyes flitted away from his face to the bed. “I’m sorry.”

Geralt said nothing. He sat on his heels with his loose hands on his lap, and he felt nothing but the cold.

“I’ve purged his body as best I could. I can’t sense any traces of Tenebris’s magic anymore, but—I don’t know what kind of damage it’s done to his mind.”

Geralt’s hands remained loose on his lap.

“Where have you been?”

The question rumbled out of his dry throat, past aching teeth. Her answer was the swift lash of a whip upon numb flesh.

“You don’t have the right to ask me that,” she snapped, but seconds later, he could sense her regret emanating from her like ripples across a crimson lake.

He turned his head to gaze at her. He didn’t know what showed on his face, or in his eyes.

“You weren’t so powerful when we last saw each other.” He stared into her wide eyes, and snarled, “Are you learning blood magic? Is that why you know Tenebris?”

His hands were still loose on his lap.

“No.” Yennefer sat up, her eyes widening even more. “No, Geralt. I would never mess with blood magic.” She shook her head with vehemence. “ _Never_.”

The tension drained from Geralt’s spine like blood from a yawning sword wound. His shoulders sagged. His head bowed from its immense weight, and his sore eyes slid shut. His loose hair formed curtains that shielded his face from view. He was very tired. He was very cold. He wanted to lie down next to Jaskier and sleep for millennia. Sleep for eternity.

He felt Yennefer’s hand touch his hand. He felt her fingers wrap around his.

“We’re not the sorceress and the witcher who were on that mountain anymore,” she murmured, with a voice, a soul that sounded centuries old. “Are we?”

His hand stayed limp in her grip.

“No,” he whispered, his eyes still shut, his head still bowed. “He’s dead.”

Yennefer said nothing. She gave his fingers a squeeze and held onto them.

He listened to Yennefer’s steady heartbeat. He listened to Jaskier’s long, shallow breaths. To Jaskier’s feeble heartbeat. He couldn’t hear his own, but that was to be expected.

A dead monster didn’t have one.

◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊

At the open front door of the farmhouse, Yennefer gave Geralt a summoning amulet that was the color of her eyes, set into burnished silver. It hung from a silver chain that was thinner than the chain of his wolf medallion. He recognized it for the peace offering it was. The symbol of a new albeit tentative friendship.

“Just hold it, and say my name. And I’ll come to you.”

Jaskier had slept for three days. For three days, Geralt had sat at his bedside in a wooden chair, and slept the nights on the floor next to the bed. For those three days, neither he or Yennefer had known if Jaskier would survive, even after she’d healed all internal injury and sealed as many of the external wounds as she could into tough scars.

An hour ago, mere minutes after dawn, Jaskier had opened his eyes.

Big, beautiful blue eyes.

But Jaskier hadn’t reacted after Geralt said his name. Hadn’t so much as blinked or moved a muscle when Geralt grasped his hand on the bed. Hadn’t reacted to anything—until Yennefer had leaned over him, her hand inches from his forehead, her violet eyes glowing with her magic.

Jaskier’s scream of total terror had torn through Geralt like the long claws of a beast. Jaskier had scrambled off the bed from Yennefer like a little, terrified bird, tumbled onto the floor in a naked heap of elbows and knees, then crawled to a corner of the room to cower against the wall. To hide his face from them in the cage of his shaking arms, while his bandaged torso quaked with soundless sobs.

Geralt had almost spewed up everything in his stomach when he remembered that this had been Jaskier’s reaction after Tenebris had flung that handful of corrupted blood into his face.

Yennefer had departed from the room in silence. Geralt had to walk around the bed, then go down on his hands and knees to make himself appear smaller, to crawl towards Jaskier. He’d stopped and sat on his heels five feet away from Jaskier. Sat there with his hands in trembling fists on his thighs, restraining himself from grabbing Jaskier and hugging the panic-stricken man tight.

Jaskier had woken up. Jaskier was alive.

Jaskier was going to be all right.

He had to be.

“I don’t know what to do,” Geralt rasped to Yennefer, clenching his fingers around the purple amulet. “He—he doesn’t seem to be—here.”

She raised a hand to wrap it around his fist, in a rare display of commiseration.

“I don’t know what to do either,” she murmured. “But I can’t stay. He’s afraid of me. Of magic.”

He lowered his eyes to their joined hands, and felt nothing at the sight. Almost a year ago, he would have felt triumphant at seeing Yennefer again, at feeling her touch upon his skin. He would have pulled her into his arms and pressed his lips to her plump ones, and he would have said sweet words that he thought she needed to hear. Words that would have coaxed her into giving him another chance.

Another chance to do what?

He didn’t know anymore. He didn’t know what the fuck he’d been thinking when he had bound her to him with the wish to the djinn. He didn’t know what the fuck he’d been saying when he had accused her of never being a good mother. He didn’t know what the fuck he’d been feeling all this time about her. About Jaskier.

All he knew was that Jaskier was upstairs, sitting in bed in a dead man’s tunic, silent and motionless like a dead man. Staring forward with those big, beautiful blue eyes. Those empty eyes.

_Jaskier, where are you?_

_Where have you gone?_

Geralt watched Yennefer walk away from him, and he didn’t call her back. He shut the door, then trudged back upstairs to the bedroom. He stood in the doorway and stared at Jaskier who hadn’t moved an inch on the bed where Geralt had arranged him: Jaskier was engulfed in the dead farmer’s knee-length, oversized tunic. His back was hunched. His shoulders were slumped, his head tilted forward. His hands were loose on his lap. His legs were straight and close together.

Jaskier looked like a pale doll that its master had abandoned and long forgotten. A battered puppet with unravelled strings.

“Jaskier.”

Geralt sat on the side of the bed, next to Jaskier’s knees. He didn’t dare to sit any closer. He didn’t know what might trigger another panic attack, or another bout of screaming. A part of him was horrified at himself that he preferred Jaskier screaming and thrashing than this—this inanimate travesty of his best friend.

He reached for Jaskier’s right hand, then grasped it.

“Jaskier, it’s over. The monster’s gone. It’s dead.”

Jaskier didn’t respond. He stared into the distance with those empty, heavy-lidded eyes at nothing. His hand was cold and limp in Geralt’s grip.

“You’re—” Geralt swallowed hard. “You’re safe now. Yennefer killed it and saved us. And she healed you.” He gave Jaskier’s hand a squeeze. “It’s gone. There’s nothing left of it in you.”

Jaskier didn’t say a word. Jaskier didn’t squeeze his hand in return.

But as Geralt watched with wide eyes, with a constricted throat and a throbbing chest, those beautiful blue eyes welled up and spilled tears down those lightly stubbled, pale cheeks. Jaskier’s expression stayed blank.

Geralt released Jaskier’s hand to pull the weeping man into his embrace. He held Jaskier tight to his chest with both arms, burying his lower face into Jaskier’s disheveled, greasy hair. Jaskier’s sweat didn’t smell abnormal anymore. Jaskier didn’t smell like blood anymore.

He didn’t hear Jaskier screaming in agony anymore.

And yet, Geralt’s eyes burned, for Jaskier didn’t move or say a word even now.

_Jaskier, where have you gone in that vast, vibrant mind of yours?_

“Are you hungry?”

He received no answer to his rasped question.

“There’s food in the larder. The farmer—” Geralt’s throat worked past a jagged stone. “There’s a lot of food. There are vegetable patches behind the farmhouse, and—a cow.” He rubbed Jaskier’s upper back. He ignored his gut-churning nausea upon recalling Jaskier drenched in a dead cow’s blood, devouring its raw flesh with animalistic snarls. “And some chickens. The farmhouse has a wing for the animals, attached to the kitchen.”

Jaskier didn’t move or say a word. Jaskier breathed against his chest, and saturated his dark grey linen shirt with wet trails.

“I’ll—make us something to eat. Get some milk,” he rasped. “Eggs sunny side up. Sausages. Some toasted bread and smoked cheese. Hm?”

No answer. No reaction.

If it wasn’t for the familiar heartbeat he could hear, that he knew like no other, Jaskier might as well be a warm corpse in his arms.

Jaskier was not a corpse. He wasn’t.

Geralt scrunched his eyes shut. He tightened his arms around his silent, motionless companion, and rocked them both back and forth, and he didn’t want to stop it even if he could.

“Okay,” he whispered, his eyes burning and burning behind their lids. “We’ll have all that. Just the way you like them.”

◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊

The nightmares were the worst for Geralt.

Five days had passed since Jaskier awakened, and every night, without fail, Jaskier would be plagued by turbulent nightmares that propelled him into violent fits of crying and flailing limbs. The nightmares were all the more unsettling to Geralt due to Jaskier’s persistent catatonia during the day.

“No—no, please—don’t kill—”

Jaskier only spoke during these nightmares, as if his voice only remembered to work when it forgot the present and skulked in the past. Jaskier’s voice was a ghost of itself. A reedy, quavery thing that was unrecognizable to Geralt.

“D-don’t kill h-him—”

During the day, Geralt had to be the puller of the unravelled strings on Jaskier’s puppet limbs: he dressed Jaskier, and fed him his meals in the bedroom, and carried him to the stream to bathe him.

He’d removed the bandages from Jaskier’s torso on the second day after Jaskier awakened as per Yennefer’s advice, before giving Jaskier his first bath since—before. He had to trudge out of the stream and onto the bank away from Jaskier for a while after seeing the mess of disfiguring scars crisscrossing Jaskier’s belly. Had to pace the grass, press the heels of his hands to his eyes, and not roar his perpetual wrath at the fucking useless gods up there in their heavens who did nothing but _watch_.

“I beg you—don’t—”

Jaskier hadn’t made a sound throughout the quick bath. In another life where they had never encountered Cecil Tenebris, Jaskier would have yelped at the chilly water, and whined non-stop about it while washing that dark, thick hair with some fragrant oil or another. Would have playfully splashed water at him, and made a silly face at him when he glowered and pressed his twitching lips together.

But this life was the only one Geralt had. In this life, Jaskier could only speak in the shadows of night, in the pall of the past.

Jaskier could only beg Geralt to not kill the monstrous thing that had mutilated him.

“Please don’t—Ge—”

Geralt could only lie on his side on the wooden floor like a worm, and stare into the endless shadow under the bed, and relive the shock of Jaskier’s nails scoring his face when he’d tried to wake Jaskier up last night.

“Don’t k-kill him—don’t kill—our baby b-boy.”

_I’m sorry, Jaskier._

_I’m so sorry, my love._

Geralt remained on the floor, his head pillowed on his arm, his legs folded up to his chest. He stared on through a stinging film of wetness into the endless void within him.

He still didn’t know what he was sorry for.

But he knew it wasn’t enough.

◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊

Geralt was in the kitchen when he heard the window of the bedroom creak open.

He froze, his right hand halting in its action of slicing some salted bacon into small strips with a knife. If not for his heightened hearing, and for his constant attention on Jaskier upstairs, he wouldn’t have noticed the sound. It shocked him enough that his mind went blank for a few seconds.

Jaskier had yet to snap out of his catatonia during the day. Before Geralt had trudged downstairs, he’d arranged Jaskier into a sitting position on the bed, leaning his back against the wall and padding the base of his skull and neck with the pillow.

Jaskier hadn’t moved. Hadn’t said a word, and just stared forward with those beautiful blue, empty eyes.

So who was opening the bedroom window?

Geralt dropped the knife onto the table. He sprinted out of the kitchen and up the stairs to the bedroom. He slammed into the partially shut door, and it banged open against the wall from the impact of his body. He lurched into the room—and couldn’t comprehend what he was seeing at first.

The bed was vacant. The bedroom’s window was open wide.

Climbing head first over the window sill was—Jaskier, still dressed in that knee-length, oversized tunic, his lower legs and feet bare. Jaskier wasn’t a silent, motionless doll anymore, nor a battered puppet with unravelled strings who needed Geralt to move him.

Jaskier was moving on his own.

Jaskier was _here_ again.

“Jaskier,” Geralt rasped, his lips cracking and curving up into something he’d thought they never could again. “Jaskier, what—”

His frangible smile splintered when Jaskier didn’t acknowledge his presence. When the enormity of what Jaskier was about to do ploughed into his mind like an axe into his skull: the bedroom was on the first floor of the farmhouse, and at this height, a fall head first to the ground was fatal, be it by a broken neck, or a crushed head, or even impalement on anything solid that jutted up from the ground.

Jaskier was climbing out the window to jump.

Jaskier was climbing out the window to _kill himself_ —

Geralt dashed across the room to the window. His mind was a blank, endless expanse of white, leeched of all feeling and thought. He was drifting outside of his body once more. He felt as if someone or something else was controlling his limbs. He watched his arms seize Jaskier around the waist and yank the screaming, thrashing man away from the window, back to safety.

He didn’t understand what was happening. He didn’t understand why Jaskier wanted to—to kill himself—

Jaskier’s fingernails were blunt, but they raked across Geralt’s face like honed blades.

“You killed him,” Jaskier wailed. “You promised me—you promised—”

Geralt dragged him onto the floor and pinned him down with his considerable bulk and weight, with his hands and legs.

“Stay still, Jaskier. Please,” Geralt said, with that reedy, quavery voice that had belonged to Jaskier in the night, in the midst of memories turned nightmares. “Stay still. You don’t—you don’t know what you’re doing—what you’re _thinking_ —”

“You _killed_ him!” Jaskier screamed up at his face. “Our baby boy!”

Tears were rolling down Jaskier’s crumpled, pale face. With a frenzied strength that seemed to rival Geralt’s, Jaskier tore his wrists out of his Geralt’s grip and clawed at his face and chest. His black linen shirt was scant protection against Jaskier’s delusional fury. His cheeks prickled with pain from lacerated skin.

Every sob from Jaskier’s wracked chest pealed in Geralt’s ears like deafening thunder. Every convulsion of Jaskier’s torso under his burned him like a storm of lightnings erupting through his body.

“It wasn’t a baby.” He grappled with Jaskier’s arms. “It was a _monster_ —”

“I loved him so much—and _you killed him_ —”

Geralt stared down at his screaming, thrashing friend through a fresh film of stinging wetness. At that appealing, youthful face contorted with such savagery, with—

“I hate you, I hate you! _I hate you!_ _I HATE YOU!_ ”

The punch that thumped his cheek was no more than a tap to a witcher like him. He’d received far more ruthless blows to his face during his early years in Kaer Morhen, from boys half the size Jaskier was. But in concert with those rage-filled, screamed words, words that he never imagined Jaskier would ever say to him, the punch was as mighty as a direct strike from a wyvern.

He tumbled off Jaskier and onto the floor. He rolled away, then struggled upright into a sitting position, both his hands pressed to the floor, his legs bent under him, his head bowed. He could smell his own blood on his cheeks. He could also smell something salty, feel something warm and wet sting the scratches on his cheeks when he blinked.

“I want to die,” Jaskier rasped.

Geralt raised his head, and saw Jaskier curled up on his side, facing away from him. Jaskier could scarcely speak between the reverberant sobs and wails that shook his whole body.

“Let me die,” Jaskier whispered. “I want—to die.”

Geralt sat back on his heels, his back hunched, his shoulders slumped. He sucked in a harsh breath, then another, then another, and another. His eyes brimmed. His chest hitched. He blinked, and blinked, unable to clear his scalding, scrunched eyes, unable to see Jaskier anymore.

 _No_ , he wanted to say, to scream at Jaskier. _No, I won’t let you._

_I won’t let you die._

But the words wouldn’t unfurl from his quivering lips. There was a mere six feet of space between him and Jaskier. A space that seemed a thousand miles wide to him, a space that he couldn’t cross to ease Jaskier’s anguish.

Jaskier—hated him. Jaskier finally, inexorably hated him like everyone else did.

Jaskier saw what he really was, now.

“I want to die,” Jaskier whispered, still turned away, receding from Geralt like the setting sun being devoured by the darkness of the earth.

No, Jaskier wasn’t a silent, motionless doll anymore, nor a battered puppet with unravelled strings who needed Geralt to move him. Jaskier was a frail ghost that had already slipped out of his fingers, no matter what he had done to keep him.

Jaskier was never here.

Jaskier had died that day in that inn room in Murivel with him.

◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊

On some level, Geralt was aware that he was losing spans of time. Sometimes he would be in the kitchen preparing another meal. Then he would be alone in the rocky stream by the farmhouse, staring down at an unrecognizable reflection that stared back at him with empty, heavy-lidded eyes. Sometimes he would be standing at the foot of the farmer’s grave, then he would be with Roach in the sheltered wing attached to the kitchen.

He was certain that he fed Roach every day. He wasn’t so certain that he cleaned her like he should, but she didn’t complain.

She was nuzzling his face. Sniffing his cheek. Pressing her face to it.

He was sitting on his heels on the dirt floor, and he didn’t recall how he ended up here. What time was it? What day was it? What _year_ was it?

He didn’t know. He didn’t give a fuck. He didn’t give a fuck about anything anymore.

Anything except for Roach. Except for the dying man in the bedroom upstairs.

Roach was licking wet trails off his cheeks. He didn’t know where they were coming from, but he hoped they wouldn’t hurt his chestnut mare. He’d stopped giving a fuck about them when he realized they were unrelenting and out of his control.

Fuck, his eyes were really sore.

“Water,” he rasped with a voice he hadn’t used for days. “Boil water.”

Roach didn’t give any opinion on that. She nickered at him, and the soft sound was laden with worry. He didn’t understand why she was worried about him, but he appreciated it all the same. Roach understood him even when he didn’t.

Why did he have to boil water?

Oh, right. Water for Jaskier.

Jaskier hadn’t eaten for days. Jaskier was refusing all food and water. But Jaskier needed food and water to not be dead. So Geralt had to boil water for Jaskier so Jaskier had good water to drink. It made a lot of sense to him.

It made so much more sense to him than the sight of Jaskier slicing open his own forearms with that small knife he’d found inside the wooden chest at the foot of the bed.

When had that happened? Two days ago? Three?

Geralt hadn’t said a word when Yennefer had appeared in the bedroom via one of her portals. Had he summoned her? Perhaps he had. He didn’t remember. All he could remember was Jaskier’s vivid blood dripping onto the floor, pooling into a broadening crimson lake that touched the toes of his boots.

Jaskier’s blood was still staining his boots. He couldn’t smell it, but he knew it was there.

He hadn’t said a word while Yennefer had knocked Jaskier out with a touch of fingertips to the forehead, while she’d healed the deep cuts in those slim forearms, leaving behind scars that were lighter in color than those on his belly. He hadn’t said a word while she’d knelt on the floor next to him and said his name over and over.

He hadn’t told her how much he’d wanted to take that bloody knife from where it’d plummeted from Jaskier’s limp hand to the floor. Take it and slice open his own throat from ear to ear, if it meant giving Jaskier some measure of peace.

What was it she’d been asking him? What had happened?

He didn’t know. He didn’t know what had happened.

He just knew he had failed.

_I’m sorry, Jaskier._

_I’m so sorry, my love._

Oh, he was back in the bedroom. Back in that wooden chair next to the bed, with Jaskier’s blood still staining his boots.

Jaskier was lying on his side on the bed, facing him. Jaskier appeared even more gaunt now in the dead farmer’s tunic. Jaskier’s beautiful blue eyes were shut in a sleep that was not sleep. Jaskier was so pale again, even with the modest layer of stubble. The dark bags under those shut eyes had returned with a vengeance, eating into whatever was left of Jaskier.

Geralt stared at the scars that marred Jaskier’s inner forearms. He stared at the ropes looped and tied taut around Jaskier’s ankles and wrists. Around Jaskier’s elbows and knees.

He didn’t have a choice. He had to tie Jaskier up this way to deter Jaskier from more suicide attempts. He didn’t know what else to do.

He didn’t know what to do.

He was done.

Whatever sick game it was Cecil Tenebris had played with them, the sorcerer had won. The fucking despicable devil of devils had taken everything from him—and he hadn’t known it. Until now. Until it was too late.

_Jaskier._

He stared at Jaskier’s face. At that appealing, youthful face that had, once upon a time, lit up so much at the mere sight of him, and not with utter hatred.

_Jaskier, you’re—_

He stared at the one who pleased him, the one who was more important to him than anyone else in his life. The one he cared for so much. The one he loved.

The one he was in love with, for all these years, and had been too blind, too selfish to see.

Twenty years was the blink of an eye to a witcher like him. But not to a human man like Jaskier: twenty years was half his lifetime. Twenty years was a very long time to know, to love and be in love with a witcher. Twenty years was a very long time to wait for a witcher to finally see what he really was.

“You’re the one,” Geralt whispered, with that cracked, guttural voice that was his alone. “You’re the one I was destined for. The one who was destined to be mine.”

But Tenebris had already slain Jaskier’s heart with his corrupted blood. The rest of Jaskier’s comatose, starved body was simply taking a little longer to join it in death.

He stared on at Jaskier’s face, but his stinging eyes saw a face that was almost a year younger. A face that had been as brilliant as the sun in the cloudless sky above them, above the sea and its frothing, rolling waves that had licked their feet while they’d stood side by side on the wet sand.

Jaskier had taken off his doublet, and his loose shirt billowed in the breeze. Jaskier had tilted his head back and spoken to him with that calming, sonorous voice, in a tender tone that he now knew Jaskier would never speak with any other. The breeze had ruffled that dark, thick hair. Those beautiful blue eyes had gleamed under the sunshine and crinkled at the corners.

Jaskier had turned that dark-haired head with its precious mind to gaze at him.

Jaskier’s eyes had crinkled and gleamed even more as those dark pink, supple lips stretched and curved up into a gratified smile—and Geralt had stared, and he’d thought to himself that even if he were to see Jaskier every day for the rest of his life, he would always remember this moment.

This rare, fragile moment, when he’d been truly happy.

He would never see Jaskier running down the beach again, whooping like the overgrown, playful boy he’d been. He would never see Jaskier frolicking in the undulating waves again, nor smile at Jaskier tumbling arse over head in an enormous wave and then totter back onto the sand looking like a bedraggled cat.

He would never see that gratified smile again.

He would never see that light burning bright in Jaskier again.

Geralt thought about the sea. He thought of its frothing, rolling waves, its rich blueness, always moving and forever unfolding beyond the remote horizon of the world. He thought about what Jaskier had said about it in that rare, fragile moment, about how much of it had yet to be discovered and known, how profound it must be. Immeasurable, inescapable. Inevitable.

In another life, another world where they had never encountered Cecil Tenebris, where they’d loved each other without fearing the loss of each other, Jaskier would be explaining to him how the sea had somehow compressed itself into a contemptible, worthless thing like him. Into the endless void within him, into his monstrous amber eyes that seared with its weight, and forced itself out of them as hot, salty rivers down his lifeless face.

Perhaps the sea was colossal enough, just enough to bear a century’s worth of tears for all the death and heartbreak in his loathsome existence.

Just enough to pay the necessary toll for his own release from this life, his own journey into the afterlife.

Later, when he no longer had a choice, after he did what he had to, he would finish the work that Tenebris had begun in Murivel. He would have his swords by then. Or at least one of his knives. If Yennefer concealed them from him again, he wasn’t worried. He didn’t require a blade to finish the work.

To be with Jaskier again, he was capable of doing anything to himself, no matter what it cost.

◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊

A heartbeat signified life. A heartbeat was the sound of a muscular organ pounding in the chest of a living entity, pumping blood through a body to keep it alive, to aid in its growth—and those were words that Vesemir would have been proud to hear from Geralt’s mouth a lifetime ago.

_What is the most enduring muscle in your body?_

There he was in his mind, his memories, just a naive child in the evening hall in Kaer Morhen, standing alone and wordless in front of Vesemir. There he was, shaking his dark-haired head like such a foolish child, not knowing the answer, not looking Vesemir in the eye.

Vesemir pressed a gloved hand flat on the left side of his chest.

_It is the heart. It is said by medics that the heart will beat two-and-a-half billion times in a human lifetime. For me, and one day for you, even more._

Vesemir removed his hand, but Geralt still felt its weight and power upon his chest, earned from centuries of death and heroics and heartbreak.

_You must protect it. Always. But you must also strengthen it, always, and never forget that you own it._

Vesemir’s fierce amber eyes stared down at him. Stared into him. Into his heart that had still been beating and whole, as innocent as the boy he’d been.

_If your heart fails, Geralt, the rest of you will fail with it._

He wasn’t that little boy anymore. He wasn’t in Kaer Morhen. He was in a farmhouse that was days away by foot from Gors Velen. He was sitting slumped in that wooden chair by the bed upon which Jaskier was laid, his head bowed low, his hands loose and numb on his lap. His aching eyes were clamped shut from a marrow-deep exhaustion, one he’d never experienced before. His head seemed to weigh a thousand pounds. His spine seemed incapable of straightening itself.

No, he wasn’t that little boy anymore. He had not been that little boy for a very long time. For over twice Jaskier’s lifetime. He wasn’t a boy anymore, but he wasn’t a man either. He wasn’t human. He was a witcher that was aberrant even to other witchers. He deserved the cold and the dark, and he had to stay incarcerated in this hundred feet-thick shell, lest he brought more suffering upon those who didn’t deserve it.

Jaskier’s heartbeat was so feeble, so slow. Jaskier’s breaths were so long and shallow. Jaskier had never deserved to be bound to him, be it by destiny or by emotions. No one deserved it.

He was so tired. He was so very cold. He wanted to lie down next to Jaskier, and sleep for eternity.

He wanted to die, too.

But he couldn’t die. Not yet, for Cecil Tenebris still lived, and he had vowed to hunt the fucking fiend for the rest of his life and exterminate him. To slowly sever each of the despicable fucker’s limbs, and then cut the fucker open from neck to groin so he would experience what his victims did.

_Vesemir, tell me how to fix a broken heart._

No answer came forth. Vesemir couldn’t hear him. Vesemir wasn’t here. If Vesemir had known how to do so, the elder witcher would have taught him.

_Tell me how to save the one I love._

_Please._

No answer came forth from the gods either, but they were never here for him, for Jaskier, nor for anyone else. Perhaps there was no answer because there was no panacea for a broken heart. Because this was his punishment for believing that he was ever worthy of happiness, that he was ever worth something.

No salvation for a broken, dead monster like him.

Geralt didn’t know how long he sat at Jaskier’s bedside. He peeled his aching eyes open, and stared at the shadows streaking across the bed and the floor. They elongated and widened, but that didn’t mean anything to him. At some point today, he’d attempted to wet Jaskier’s cracked, dry lips, to trickle some water down Jaskier’s throat from a cup. Was it before he’d visited Roach downstairs? Was it this morning? Minutes ago?

There was a metal cup on the closed wooden chest at the foot of the bed.

That didn’t mean anything to him.

His eyes fluttered shut. He breathed in tandem with Jaskier. He listened to Jaskier’s heartbeat that was almost as languid as his, and remained silent and motionless.

His wolf medallion vibrated on his chest.

He heard the front door of the farmhouse creak open, then close. He heard light footsteps going up the stairs. Approaching the bedroom.

He smelled lilac and gooseberry.

Yennefer didn’t say a word to him. She walked into the bedroom, then stood at his side. He could tell she was staring down at Jaskier. At the ropes lashing his limbs together. He could also tell when she aimed those violet eyes at his face and stared at him.

He remained silent and motionless, even when he felt her hand stroke the curvature of his bowed head. When her slender fingers carded through his long, tied hair with a gentleness she’d never shown him in all their years of acquaintance.

“There is a spell.”

He remained silent and motionless, but he listened.

“Centuries ago, a king traveled to Aretuza and begged its most powerful mages to develop one to save his son, the prince and sole heir to the throne,” Yennefer said, still carding her fingers through his hair. “A war had raged for years between his kingdom and another. His son had commanded a brigade, and had constantly fought on the front lines with his soldiers.” She paused, then murmured, “At the end of the war, the prince’s body returned relatively intact. His mind had not.”

Geralt slowly raised his head, his eyes still shut.

Yennefer rested her hand on the crown of his head, then said, “The spells the mages created were drastic but effective ones. They were a last resort for the insane, for those tormented by traumatic experiences they couldn’t escape.” Her pause this time was longer. “The main variant completely erases a person’s memories. All of them. But their personality remains intact, and so do their skills, basic or otherwise. Like speaking, and reading. Writing. Singing.”

Geralt peeled open his dry, sore eyes. He turned his head, just enough to stare at Jaskier’s pale, stubbled face.

“The spell has other variants because the king refused to allow his son’s memories to be wiped out. The variant that was used on him transfers all memories into another person’s mind,” Yennefer said, withdrawing her hand from his head. “His mother, the queen, volunteered to accept his memories.”

The silence that ensued was loaded with tension. Geralt ruptured it with a question.

“What happened to her?”

His voice was the crunch of gravel under a boot. He hadn’t been aware of how dry and itchy his throat was until he spoke. He must have sat here for hours and hours.

Yennefer was staring at his face again.

“The spell worked. Too well. According to the records from Aretuza, the transfer itself was excruciating, and in some cases, had driven the receivers of the memories mad. In her case, she survived it.” She let out an almost noiseless sigh. “It was the stress of—living his memories of the war that drove her mad instead. She killed herself. Walked into a river near the castle and drowned.”

Geralt stared on at Jaskier. He pressed his parched lips together, to stop himself from telling Yennefer that he might very well do the same after finding and killing Tenebris. He didn’t require a blade to kill himself.

“And the prince?”

Yennefer’s unblinking stare bored into his face.

“He couldn’t remember anything. Or anyone,” she replied after a long, taut minute. “But he stopped trying to kill himself, and made a full recovery.” Her gaze slid away from his face. “Apparently he lived a long, fulfilling life after that. He inherited the throne after his father’s death, and ruled till the day he died.”

Geralt stared on at Jaskier, and he tried to imagine Jaskier without any memories. Jaskier, with no memories at all of their adventures and journeys across the Continent throughout the past twenty years. Jaskier, who wouldn’t remember that rare, fragile moment on the wet sand of the beach under a cloudless sky anymore. Jaskier, who would look at him and see a total stranger.

Jaskier, who would be free from so much pain and suffering, if he didn’t remember what had happened to him.

“Can you do it?”

It was a stupid question if he’d asked it because he doubted her abilities as a sorceress. He didn’t doubt her on that. Not for a second. But he did doubt her willingness to cast the spell on him, despite her informing him of it. She had concealed his weapons for good reason.

He was a monster that only another monster like Tenebris could ever see, and know.

He was a monster just like Tenebris, for what he was going to do to Jaskier.

“Do what?”

Ah, Yennefer wanted him to spell it out. Yennefer wanted no uncertainty as to what he needed her to do to save Jaskier. Fine—he would gladly absolve her of any culpability.

He tilted his head back and gazed up at her. He knew his eyes were inflamed and red-rimmed, and that his bristly, haggard face told her more than any words from his dry mouth could.

“Transfer his memories into me.”

She stared down at him with those large, violet eyes. Those violet eyes that gleamed with rare, unmistakable compassion.

“Geralt,” she murmured. “People have gone mad from the transfer. From the incredible agony of it.”

He stared back at her, and said, “So it will hurt me.”

A muscle bunched in her jaw as she gritted her teeth and scowled at him.

“Yes,” she answered, to his question and to his confession.

Slowly, his lips cracked and curved up into something that might have been a smile a lifetime ago. It was devoid of mirth. It brimmed with self-loathing.

“Good,” he growled, and his fangs glinted between his lips.

◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊

The spell that was going to save Jaskier was not the only gift Yennefer would give Geralt, unworthy as he was of receiving them. She had taken his sword that he’d used to attack the monster in the barn—and with the corrupted blood still on its blade, she’d tracked down the location of Cecil Tenebris and his palatial lair.

“The fucking devil’s life is mine to claim,” he snarled, although not in anger at her.

He could already taste Tenebris’s blood on his tongue, between his fangs.

“I’m not fighting you on that, Geralt,” she said, reaching up to grasp the sides of his head with both hands. “But I am going with you. I have to. And Jaskier needs a deep healing sleep if we’re going to go ahead with that spell.”

“I’m not changing my mind,” he growled, his eyebrows lowered, his teeth gritted.

Yennefer wasn’t afraid of him, even now. She had never been afraid of him.

She lowered her arms, stepped back from him and said, “I will ask one more time. The answer you give me then will be the one I accept.”

He said nothing to that. He turned away from her and rigged himself out in his cleaned, repaired armor in silence. From the corners of his eyes, he watched Yennefer press her fingertips to Jaskier’s forehead, watched her eyes glow with magic.

Jaskier appeared so small, so vulnerable in the large bed, tucked under that thick, woolen blanket to the chin. Geralt had stripped away the ropes from his limbs, and he now laid supine, his arms and legs straightened.

Geralt could almost convince himself that Jaskier was having a nap. That when Jaskier opened those beautiful blue eyes once more, they would land on him, and they would shine with bliss at the mere sight of him. Like they always had. Like they always had, when he’d been too blind, too selfish, too immersed in his path of a witcher instead of his heart to see.

When Jaskier opened those beautiful blue eyes once more, they would land on him, and only see what everyone else saw.

And he deserved it.

He was a selfish bastard. He really was, to linger by the bed while Yennefer stood in the doorway, to lean down and press his lips on Jaskier’s forehead, knowing Jaskier would rather claw his monstrous eyes out than allow him anywhere near him. Jaskier’s forehead was cold and smooth. Jaskier didn’t react. Jaskier breathed on.

Geralt straightened up, and raised his eyes to gaze at Yennefer. Her expression was impassive, but her eyes showed no surprise, nor hostility. She calmly gazed back at him with meaningful eyes—and when the revelation struck him, it was akin to a kick from Roach’s hind legs.

She knew what he felt for Jaskier.

She’d known long before he had known it for himself.

She turned around and walked out of the room, out of Geralt’s sight. He listened to her light footsteps going down the stairs, to the front door opening, then closing with a creak. She was going to set wards of protection around the farmhouse and cast an invisibility spell to hide it from view. There was no way he would leave Jaskier alone, otherwise.

He bowed his head to gaze down at Jaskier. He reached down and gently ran his gloved fingers through that dark, medium-length hair, following the curvature of that precious head.

_I’m going to save you, Jaskier. You’re going to be all right._

_I won’t let you die._

If things went according to his plan—after he killed Tenebris, after the transfer of Jaskier’s memories into him, after Jaskier inevitably rejected him—he would be truly dead soon, by his own hand.

As it should be.

◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊

Cecil Tenebris was born two centuries and nine years ago in a town that no longer existed, neither in the world or on the map of the Continent. No one knew if that was his true name, or a name he had bestowed upon himself. No one knew much of anything about his childhood, other than his own claims that he’d been a gorgeous child his parents were enamored with, that everyone fell in love with him at first sight and would do anything to please him.

No one disputed any of that: he was a gorgeous man who hadn’t aged a day since he turned twenty-five, and everywhere he went, men and women alike stared at him with sheer awe and lust. His luxurious robes and sparkling jewelry magnified his physical beauty and youth. His formidable magical powers guaranteed that anywhere he went, people of all social strata idolized him, begged him to give them a moment’s attention. Begged him to love them, to make them worth something.

He hated them all: the rich and the poor, the dominant and the weak, the ugly and the beautiful. He eagerly told them this, but they basked in his hatred, for it was better than his indifference. His beauty, power, and wealth blinded them. His smiles, his monetary indulgence, his carefully crafted persona merged to become the perfect masquerade to hide his actual self.

He was a sorcerer. He was a murderer. He was a devil of devils who had, by his own boast to a girl whose face he’d burned off for the fun of it, killed his first victim at the age of eleven, in the cellars of his family manor where no one could hear the boy scream. He’d used a kitchen knife to disembowel him like the cooks would with the chickens and pigs.

All that bright red inside had fascinated him. All that hot, steaming life inside, that he could touch and smell, that he could _see_. All that life inside, that he could snuff out with the single yank of a blade.

All that _life_ , that he could control and play with—if he only knew how to create his own.

He had told another girl, who was missing her legs after he’d crushed them to pulp with a spell, that he’d spent decades after his tenth murder trying to create life with his burgeoning magic. He’d sewn the reproductive organs of beasts into the bodies of women and impregnated them with seed from other beasts. Spliced men and monsters by hacking them into parts and stitching them together into new mutations.

But none of them ever survived. He hadn’t been powerful enough.

Until he learned blood magic.

That, according to a duke who’d narrowly escaped becoming another of his victims, had required decades more research and experiments. So many towns and cities across the Continent had taken so very long to notice the pattern of citizens going missing whenever he passed through. He chose people who were poor, who slipped between the cracks of society. People no one cared for, nor cared to seek justice for, even after their butchered, discarded corpses were discovered. It had been convenient to blame monsters that were not human-shaped for those corpses.

So on and on his defilement of the people of the Continent went, for decades running into a century.

Then, at the age of one hundred and twenty-four years, he successfully used his blood magic to impregnate a woman with a monster of his own making. No one would have known about it had it not been for the woman secretly writing down her account of her relationship with him, of her magical baby that he’d blessed her with after healers had told her she was barren.

Her invaluable account, that had been written in a leather-bound journal, that had found its way to the prodigious libraries of Aretuza fifty years later.

“Her last entry described similar traits of her body to Jaskier’s,” Yennefer said to Geralt thirty-five years after that, in the present, while they stood outside the farmhouse under a mild afternoon sun. “The black veins. The red eyes. The rapid progression of growth. The extreme hunger.”

Geralt turned his head away from Yennefer to gaze across the cleared land to the empty road in the distance. He had no idea how many days had elapsed since he and Jaskier had ridden Roach down that very road to arrive at this place.

“Jaskier couldn’t even see those things. He thought—he thought everything was normal.” Geralt sucked in a shuddering breath. “He thought the monster was a baby. A baby that was his—and—”

His mouth refused to form and utter that last word. He swallowed hard. Clenched his hands into fists at his sides, and shifted on his feet. His sheathed swords were solemn weights against his back.

Soon, one of them was going to savor fresh, hot blood again.

Both, if the imminent battle called for it.

Yennefer’s expression stayed neutral. She stared at him until he looked her in the eye again, then said, “I’m telling you all this about Tenebris because you need to understand just how fucked up he is. How far he’ll go to do whatever he wants.”

Geralt pressed his lips into a thin line.

“If he’s been practicing blood magic for eighty-five years and more,” Yennefer added, “he’s not human anymore.” She narrowed her violet eyes. “He never was.”

He gazed over Yennefer’s shoulder at the rocky stream beyond, but what he saw was Tenebris slashing open his own inner forearm with that metal claw. Tenebris, releasing viscous blood that was almost black, that had invaded Jaskier’s body like black, pulsing worms.

“His blood seemed—alive.” Geralt shut his eyes for several seconds, then opened them and glanced at Yennefer. “As if it was—a living entity in itself. It could move on its own. All he had to do was—was say some sort of incantation and—throw it onto Jaskier’s face—”

Again, he averted his face. He sucked in another shuddering breath. He clenched his hands even harder, then opened them, stretching his aching fingers. He turned his head to look at the farmhouse—but it was invisible now. Jaskier was invisible now.

He shivered under his armor and clothes at the fleeting thought that it was actually gone. That Jaskier was actually gone, and he simply hadn’t accepted it yet.

“We have one chance to kill him, Geralt. If we fail today, he’ll never stop hunting us until we’re dead.”

He glanced at Yennefer again, his eyes fierce and wide.

“We can’t let his blood get inside us. If he’s anything like that monster in the barn, your swords can hurt him, but won’t kill him.” Her lips curled up in a tiny, ferocious smile. “But I can. You have to distract the arrogant bastard for me.”

Geralt bared his teeth, and snarled, “So I’m just _bait_ now?”

“No. I meant it—I’m not standing in your way of ending the fucker’s life. But if your swords can’t kill him, I’m all you’ve got. Especially if his blood gets you.” Her gaze intensified. “Do you really want to find out what it feels like for one of those _things_ to grow inside you?”

Geralt’s throat constricted to a pinhole. He stared down at Yennefer, and he didn’t blink, and he didn’t retch at the memory of Jaskier sprawled on blood-soaked hay, of Jaskier’s mangled belly as Tenebris’s monstrous progeny crawled out of it. Of those numerous amber eyes that had been just like his, staring at him with such bestial madness.

“No, I didn’t think so.”

Yennefer stepped back. Geralt drew in another breath as his throat opened up, his roiling gut settling down.

They stared at each other for several more seconds, Geralt with narrowed eyes while Yennefer’s eyes were shuttered. There was something about her body language and composure that piqued his curiosity: she was very confident for someone who was about to confront a sorcerer as diabolical and powerful as Cecil Tenebris.

On top of her investigations at Aretuza and across the Continent, and her tracking down of Tenebris, what else had she been up to, since the day Geralt had told her about his abject experiences with the sorcerer? What was she not telling him?

“Do you trust me, Geralt?”

Geralt said nothing. He gave her firm nod, and from him, it was as good as any word he could have vocalized. They were as prepared as they were going to be. They knew what they each had to do, if they wished to win.

And if Yennefer had a secret card up her sleeve, he did trust her to be on his side, to fight at his side.

Jaskier needed them both to survive and return here.

She took a few more steps backward. Then she turned away from him with her right arm outstretched, conjuring the portal that would lead them to their target.

Geralt still despised using portals: he’d heard of unfortunate people being ripped in half and killed instantly by ill-set or unstable portals. He had no desire to join their wretched ranks.

But this one time, he would stride through one without hesitation.

He did so without looking back at Yennefer.

It took him a moment to regain his bearings on the other side of the portal. He felt Yennefer slip past him, but he couldn’t see her: an invisibility spell on herself, then. He felt the pins-and-needles sensation of the portal swirling shut behind him.

He was bewildered that blood-red, multi-eyed monsters weren’t already assailing him, that Tenebris himself wasn’t trying to slaughter him.

He was standing alone at the head of a long, stone passageway lined with narrow, tall windows and intricate tapestries. At the end of the passageway was a set of massive, wooden double doors with forged iron hoop handles. He walked down the passageway with slow, steady steps that echoed. He couldn’t sense Yennefer, but he knew she was close.

As he passed the tapestries, he glanced at them—and wished he hadn’t. They were aesthetic at the first glimpse, but upon scrutiny, revealed themselves for the horrific depictions of cruelty and savagery that they were. Geralt was no stranger to such things, for he had inflicted both on others, and suffered them as well. But these tapestries that shamelessly displayed Tenebris’s malignant fantasies—that portrayed bloody beheadings, disembowelments, dismemberments, impalements, and hideous monsters devouring frightened, screaming humans—sickened Geralt to the stomach.

If he was a monster who so many people abhorred and feared, what sort of monster was Tenebris, that so many people adored and worshipped him?

He had no answer. He wasn’t sure he wanted one.

When he was ten feet away from the double doors, they swung open wide to welcome him.

He halted in his tracks, his entire body tense and ready for an assault, his eyes wide and unblinking.

There was no one there. All he could see past the open doors was a candlelit, vast chamber with a multitude of crammed bookshelves that reached the high ceiling. In the center of the chamber was an ornate writing desk on a round, woven rug.

Attached to the writing desk’s aprons were iron chains that ended in shackles on the stone floor.

With his heightened vision, he could see the old bloodstains on them.

“Don’t be shy, Geralt of Rivia. Come in. Let me see you.”

His witcher discipline was all that stopped him from startling at Tenebris’s lilting voice that seemed to speak directly into his ears. He drew in a fortifying breath. He approached the chamber with the same slow, steady steps.

When he entered the chamber, his wide eyes immediately alighted on Tenebris who’d been standing out of sight, to the left of the writing desk. Tenebris’s appearance had not changed at all since Murivel: those piercing eyes that stared at him were still a lighter blue than Jaskier’s, and that dark, thick, wavy hair was combed, and that pale skin glowed with health and youth that Geralt now knew was unnatural.

Geralt now knew that the fucking despicable sorcerer wore those luxurious, red robes because they were the color of a child’s eviscerated belly.

“Look at you,” Tenebris proclaimed with such delight. Such hubris. “Look at all that rage, that _hate_ in you.”

Geralt didn’t know what showed in his eyes or on his face. He didn’t know how he was still standing where he was, with his trembling fists at his sides, his feet planted on the floor. He didn’t know how he wasn’t already whipping out his sword and charging at Tenebris, chopping off the fucker’s arms and legs and _head_.

But Yennefer needed the distraction.

They had _one_ chance to mete out retribution for Jaskier. For all of Tenebris’s victims.

“ _Look at you_ ,” Tenebris drawled, sauntering up to Geralt as if he was a mere mangy dog and not a century-old witcher a split second away from decapitating him.

Tenebris’s gold necklaces and rings glittered in the candlelight. Tenebris’s broad grin made him feel slimy scales scraping him down to his chilled marrow. He stared at the repulsive fiend, and said nothing.

“Yes.” Tenebris angled his head to one side, staring back at him as if he was a fascinating specimen on the dissection block. “Yes, you see what you really are, now. Don’t you?”

_Don’t snap._

_Don’t let the fucker get to—_

“Where is your sweet, innocent bard, witcher? The one so in love with you.”

Geralt stared at Tenebris, and reverberating underneath the sorcerer’s voice, he could hear that shrill humming sound, that penetrated his ears and clogged his skull, that fried his mind and body like a lightning bolt. A sound that heralded bloodshed and death.

“Did he see you? Before he died?” Tenebris took another step closer, staring into his eyes. “Did he see what you really are?” Tenebris’s malevolent grin broadened even more. “Yes. _Yes_ , he did, didn’t he? And he _hated_ you.”

He didn’t know what showed in his eyes or on his face, or how his sword wasn’t already thrusting through Tenebris’s chest. He didn’t know how to withstand the terrible enormity that _Tenebris_ knew Jaskier had been in love with him long before he himself did.

What he did know in this fateful moment in time was that Tenebris truly was an arrogant, pretentious piece of shit. So presumptuous of his power, his corrupted magic, his safety in his own lair, that it had never occurred to him that he would one day meet a mage more cunning, more powerful, more vicious than him.

Tenebris flew up into the air as if giant, invisible hands had seized him.

For a few seconds, Geralt thought Tenebris was about to attack him, and he leapt back, his gloved hand grabbing the hilt of his sword. But Tenebris hovered in the air, his arms and legs extended away from his body, as if those giant, invisible hands were gripping those limbs. Geralt could see the sinewy muscles in them bulging and straining while Tenebris struggled against his invisible shackles.

“How are you doing this, witcher?”

Tenebris’s lilting voice was eerily placid. Tenebris stared at him with eyes now wide with surprise, with puzzlement, even as the sorcerer let out a boyish snicker edged with incredulity.

Geralt slowly lowered his right arm down to his side. Against his chest, his wolf medallion vibrated. He didn’t answer Tenebris.

He didn’t have to—for Yennefer discarded her invisibility and revealed herself to him and Tenebris like an apparition stepping out of the shadows. She stood at his left side. She stared up at Tenebris with violet eyes that glowed with magic.

“Ugh, look at _you_ ,” she said, as if Tenebris was a brat who was beneath her—and he was.

The bound sorcerer stared at her with those wide, puzzled eyes now. Geralt felt a renewed surge of detestation for Tenebris at the blatant condescension he showed towards her. She was holding him prisoner without so much as a puff of effort.

“Yennefer of Venderberg,” Tenebris drawled, disdain pervading every word, “I’m honored. I was unaware that you’re acquainted with this—” Tenebris glanced at Geralt. “Freakish mongrel.”

Geralt didn’t react: he’d been described far worse than that in the past.

Tenebris aimed those light blue eyes at Yennefer again, and said with that eerily placid voice, “Tell me, how did you find me?”

“Your blood,” Yennefer replied with a bored expression.

Geralt knew her long enough to recognize it as the false front it was, a taunt towards Tenebris. Tenebris’s lips curled up in a mirthless smile. A smile that slithered across his face like a red snake.

“Ah.” He glanced at Geralt once more. “I wish I’d been there for the birth. I’m sure it was an—explosive event. You must have battled with my offspring after that. Beautiful creature, isn’t it?”

For the first time since they’d met in Murivel, Geralt spoke to the fucking despicable monster. A monster, Geralt realized only now, that had no heartbeat. How was Tenebris staying alive if he had no beating heart?

“It’s a pile of ashes I piss on every day,” Geralt snarled, baring his fangs. “Yeah, it’s as beautiful as you.”

Tenebris’s smile lingered.

“Tell me, Yennefer, my dear,” Tenebris said, staring at Geralt with eyes that were turning blood-red, “how you managed to do this to me.”

Yennefer’s lips twisted in a sneer. She stepped forward, and she glared up at him, her hands open and loose at her sides. She was going to speak—but it was of her own free will, not on Tenebris’s command.

“You never bothered setting any wards of protection. You never bothered to even conceal this hideaway of yours from magical detection. But why would you?” Her tone was as disdainful as Tenebris’s. She tilted her head to one side. “You’ve spent the last eighty years murdering everyone who dares to defy you. You _want_ people to come to you. To have more victims walk themselves straight into your lair, your _trap_.”

Tenebris’s smile widened. He was still ensnared by Yennefer’s giant, invisible hands of magic, although he no longer struggled against them. His eyes were fully blood-red and glowing: they were as spine-chilling to Geralt now as they’d been in that inn room in Murivel.

“It’s not my fault they’re too weak to stop me. They only have themselves to blame for not pleasing me.”

The detestation in Geralt towards Tenebris swelled into a storm that turned his own vision blood-red, that augmented that shrill humming sound in his ears, his skull.

“Here’s the thing about arrogant, rich fuckers like you,” Yennefer said, her voice now steel and wrath, “you always forget the people you trample on, the people who slip between the cracks and out of sight. You always forget that they’re _people_.”

Tenebris glanced at her, and so did Geralt. There was no fear at all in her eyes or on her ravishing face. She stood tall and steadfast, her dark, wavy hair framed by the fur collar of her coat.

“You may be the most powerful practitioner of blood magic on the Continent—but you still need to drink and eat. Like everyone else.”

Tenebris’s smile froze. He stared at Yennefer with eyes gone cold and round. The muscles in his trapped arms twitched as he clenched his hands into fists.

Yennefer snorted, then said, “Of course you would never question your terrified slaves, or consider what they do outside of serving you hand and foot. You don’t even notice their existence unless you’re picking out your next victim, do you?” She crossed her arms under her bosom. “And who would dare to oppose you, to _end_ you, knowing what you’re capable of doing to them?”

She took another step forward, tilting her head back to maintain eye contact with Tenebris. But she wasn’t the impotent one here. She never was.

“I’ll tell you who: the people you’ve abused their whole lives, who you treat lower than dirt under your soles. The people who have nothing to lose. Because you already took everything away from them.”

Geralt stared at Yennefer’s striking profile. Decades ago, her physical appearance had been drastically different: before her years at Aretuza, before she’d known about her magical powers, she had been, in her own words, an “ugly, hunchbacked thing” that everyone around her had loathed and wanted gone. She had been one of those poor, vulnerable people who others trampled on, who slipped between the cracks and out of sight. Who no one had cared for, despite not being a monster, despite being a girl who’d simply wanted to be worth something.

“Your slaves were easy enough to identify. All of them were maimed in some way or another, and people were scared to go near them unless they flashed your coins.” Yennefer sneered up at Tenebris. “You have quite the penchant for burning their faces, or crippling an arm.”

Geralt could visualize Yennefer approaching those slaves in a marketplace, while they procured ingredients for meals, hiding their disfigurements under a hood or cloak. She would have played it smart by using a glamor to hide her true appearance. Enticed them with a mug of mead or a warm meal, and then bluntly promised them she would kill Tenebris and free them from their subjugation if they helped her with her plan.

“The concoction that’s got you under my control? It’s tasteless. It has no smell or color, and it’s undetectable by any magic except mine. Latent until I’m close enough to activate it.” Yennefer uncrossed her arms and lowered them to her sides. “You’ve been eating it with your meals for days. Absorbing it into your whole body.”

Tenebris’s smile was now a bestial snarl that bared both rows of teeth. Geralt held his ground when black, pulsing veins abruptly erupted up Tenebris’s neck and onto his cheeks, when he unwillingly recalled the same veins desecrating Jaskier’s belly. Tenebris strained against Yennefer’s magical domination over him, his limbs shaking in place, his fingers futilely clawing at the air.

Yennefer’s eyes continued to glow. She did not so much as blink with exertion.

“You were dead,” she snarled, “the instant you targeted Geralt of Rivia.”

She stepped backward until she stood at Geralt’s side again. She raised her right arm and aimed her open right hand at Tenebris. Her eyes glowed brighter, and her long hair began to float.

As Tenebris snarled at her like a rabid dog, she manipulated him as if he was a doll, tilting his whole body forward in the air, and stretching his arms forward and down in front of him. He was in the perfect position for his wrists to be manacled.

But that wasn’t Yennefer’s plan.

“Geralt, please cut off his hands.”

The satisfaction he felt at hearing that instruction was indescribable. He bared his teeth in a mirthless grin. He whipped out his sword from its sheath on his back, and gripped its hilt with both hands.

“With pleasure,” he growled.

He positioned himself, then swung his sword down in a wide arc across Tenebris’s forearms, inches above the wrists. The blade sliced through meat and bone with a squelching noise that was drowned by Tenebris’s shriek of agony. The severed appendages plummeted to the floor, and Geralt jumped back, anticipating spurts of blood from the stumps of the still shrieking sorcerer.

There were none.

What happened was far worse than anything he could have imagined.

Tenebris’s corrupted blood exploded out of those grisly stumps as dark crimson geysers, writhing in the air like frenetic tentacles in place of the lost hands. While Geralt gaped in horror, the tentacles of blood pulled themselves into rippling masses of red that seemed to bubble and squirm under its shiny, wet surface. Geralt couldn’t comprehend what he was witnessing—until the rippling masses of blood started to solidify into familiar shapes.

Wrists. Palms. Thumbs. The other fingers. The back of the hands.

Hands that regrew their skin, nails, and sparse hair, and melded with the rest of Tenebris’s forearms.

Tenebris wasn’t shrieking in pain anymore. He was cackling like a sadistic child, his blood-red eyes squeezed shut in his glee, his new hands and fingers wriggling in the air.

If not for the amputated hands on the stone floor below Tenebris, Geralt would have believed he’d hallucinated chopping off the sorcerer’s hands and watching them _grow back_.

“Did you think—you—were the first to try that?” Tenebris wheezed between those raucous cackles. “Do you know—how many already had?”

Geralt stared at the severed hands on the floor. He clenched his hand around the hilt of his sword, and he forced himself to suck in a breath, to ignore the nauseating stench emanating from those severed hands, from Tenebris.

Yennefer had been right: his swords couldn’t kill Tenebris, and neither would his meager attack spells. Without her, he would already be dead. Or worse, Tenebris would enslave him like he’d enslaved countless others—and chain him to that writing desk, shackle him to the floor, and torture him for a very, very long time for entertainment.

“I’m sure you’ve kept count,” Yennefer replied, the glow of her eyes dimmer, flaunting that bored expression again. “But I don’t give a fuck. None of them were me.”

He didn’t understand why Yennefer was so calm and collected, when Tenebris had just proved that he could survive any number of dismemberments, and restore himself to his original state—

With the flick of her hand, purple flames engulfed the amputated hands and burned them to ashes. Purple flames also engulfed the blade of Geralt’s sword, cleansing it of Tenebris’s corrupted blood.

Tenebris stared down at the ashes that were his former hands.

Tenebris was no longer laughing.

Yennefer turned her head to gaze at Geralt. He gazed back, awaiting her next instruction.

“Geralt,” she murmured. “He won’t die for a long while yet. Feel free to chop him up until he does.” Her plump lips curved up into that tiny, ferocious, terrifying smile. “He will hurt, every single time.”

They stared at each other for several tense seconds. It was a peculiar time for Geralt to feel a wave of pride for her, but he did. Pride for her cunning and intelligence, for her bravery and loyalty. She was never obligated to lay down her life for his sake, or for Jaskier’s, but she did.

Death was patient. Death outlasted everyone and everything. Death always won, in the end.

Death was also merciful.

And immediate death was too merciful for the likes of Cecil Tenebris.

Geralt lost count of the hours as he hacked away at Tenebris’s constantly regenerating arms and legs with his sword, over and over. Tenebris’s screams of pain were louder than the shrill humming in Geralt’s ears, throughout his galvanized body. Every time the sorcerer attempted to cast a spell, to cry out an incantation, Yennefer swiftly silenced him by crushing his throat with invisible force. Geralt was tempted to cut away Tenebris’s vocal cords—but they would just regrow, like the rest of his unnatural body.

If any of Tenebris’s amputated limbs were capable of moving on their own, neither Geralt or Yennefer noticed: she burned them all to ashes with her magical fire soon after they hit the floor. The low pile of ashes became a range of mountains under Tenebris.

There was only so long that Geralt could punish Tenebris in this manner, for a man’s body carried only so much blood in it.

Geralt knew Tenebris was dying when the sorcerer’s limbs no longer regenerated into their recognizable forms, instead becoming hideous protrusions that rippled under the skin as if snakes swam beneath it. Tenebris knew it too, for he was cackling once more, staring at Geralt with those blood-red, deranged eyes.

“You can kill my body and my blood, Geralt of Rivia,” Tenebris croaked, grinning with fangs slathered in blood almost black, “but I’ll always live on in you. I’ll be there every time you think of your sweet, dead bard.” His torso convulsed as his malformed limbs twisted in agonizing shapes. “Every time you think of him, and remember that he saw what you really are, and how much he hated you—for being the useless, worthless _monster_ you are.”

Not a drop of Tenebris’s blood had splattered on Geralt. Yennefer had ensured that.

But he was filthy to the core. He was a filthy failure of a witcher, a grotesque perversion of a human being. A broken, dead monster unworthy of salvation. Jaskier had indeed learned that truth for himself.

Geralt was a monster that only another monster like Tenebris could ever see, and know—and no one would ever hate him as much as he hated himself.

“You did all this to me, to Jaskier, just to make me see what a _monster_ I am?” He heard that peculiar sound echoing around him again, that sound akin to a hysterical chuckle and a harsh sob combined. “You fucking degenerate _worm_ ,” he rasped, “I’ve known that all my life.”

His own fangs were bared now. His clenched, clicking jaws were the jaws of death, bathed in the old, dried blood of the one he loved, the one he would always love even when the gods and other monsters wouldn’t.

He gripped the hilt of his sword with both hands. He swung it up over his head, and felt no pleasure whatsoever at the faltering of Tenebris’s bloody grin, at Tenebris’s dawning realization that the sick game between them had been pointless. Not when it had come at the cost of the happiness he could have had with Jaskier.

“Your fucking offspring _didn’t_ kill Jaskier,” he roared. “ _Now join it in HELL!_ ”

He swung down his sword with all his strength on Tenebris’s head. It cleaved the sorcerer’s body in half from head to groin in a single blow. As the blade carved through flesh and bone and organs, Geralt learned why Tenebris had no heartbeat: the sorcerer’s organs were misshapen, rotten things that plummeted to the stone floor into stinking mounds of dead meat and sludge on ashes. The sorcerer’s heart was a small, withered thing that looked like a warg had consumed it and then vomited it in disgust.

An invisible force grabbed him, sweeping him off his feet and hauling him away from Tenebris’s bisected corpse to safety behind Yennefer. His sword flew out of his grasp onto the floor.

“Geralt, _stay back!_ ”

Yennefer glared with blindingly glowing eyes at the nightmarish manifestation of Tenebris’s corrupted blood billowing up from the two halves of the corpse that still floated in the air. If the corrupted blood before had been dark crimson tentacles, it was now a rapidly swelling, swirling monster that grew innumerable eyes of varied colors and mouths full of sharp fangs, screaming in bestial rage at them.

It billowed like blood-red, opaque smoke up to the high ceiling of the chamber. It stared at them with those innumerable eyes—and Geralt could see that some of them were amber like his. Geralt could hear innumerable screams that erupted from those fanged mouths, screams that sounded so very human and frightened.

Geralt could hear the dead farmer screaming and screaming in his mind.

Geralt could hear Jaskier screaming in agony and terror, just like he had in that inn room in Murivel, from those mouths.

Purple flames engulfed the billowing, screaming monster of corrupted blood before Geralt could scream in terror himself, still floating a foot up in the air behind Yennefer and gripped in place by her magic. He shoved a gloved hand over his mouth. He panted through his nose, and stared at the tremendous pillar of magical fire burning the monster to death, and told himself over and over that Jaskier wasn’t inside the monster, that Jaskier was still in the farmhouse near Gors Velen, that Jaskier needed him and Yennefer to go back to save him.

Jaskier wasn’t dead.

Tenebris was.

The two distorted halves of the sorcerer’s burning corpse plummeted to the stone floor and landed with vile, crunching noises on the mountains of ashes. The ashes billowed into the air from the impact, then drifted back down onto dark grey husks still enveloped in shrinking purple flames. The monster born from his corrupted blood was now nothing more than flakes and strips of solid ash that wafted down like unholy snow. The gold necklaces and rings that had adorned his neck and fingers sparkled in the ashes, in the incandescence of those flames.

Yennefer’s violet eyes weren’t glowing anymore. Geralt wasn’t floating in the air anymore. His feet were flat on the floor. All that held him upright was Yennefer hugging him as tight as he was hugging her, while she stroked the back of his head and let him bury his hot, streaked face into the fur collar of her coat.

They had survived. They had won today’s battle.

Cecil Tenebris was dead at last.

But for Geralt, the heartbreak was just beginning.

◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊

The wooden floor of the dead farmer’s bedroom was unyielding under Geralt’s supine body that was dressed in only a linen shirt and trousers. He’d slept on this floor for so many nights now, but he couldn’t recall the number of those nights. Everything before his final confrontation with Tenebris was a numbed haze to him: faded images in a fog he couldn’t leave, echoing whispers that were muffled to his ears.

Everything except Jaskier.

Geralt had waited for three days for Yennefer to recover from the battle with Tenebris. Jaskier had been in that deep healing slumber for as long. Even now, laid flat on the floor in that oversized tunic next to Geralt, he stayed unconscious, his stubbled face slack and wan, his limp arms and legs straight. He stayed far away from Geralt, in a place where Geralt couldn’t reach him, no matter how far and fast he rode on Roach.

When Jaskier opened those beautiful blue eyes again, he wouldn’t be the Jaskier that Geralt knew anymore. He wouldn’t be the Jaskier who strode at his side through rain and sunshine, who sang about the White Wolf to the people of the Continent, and truly believed that valorous hero and Geralt were one and the same. He wouldn’t be the Jaskier who gazed at him with those large, concerned eyes, and asked him what was wrong, asked him to talk to him, because he’d cared for him.

Jaskier would not love him anymore.

And he absolutely deserved it, for what he was about to do to the man he loved, and would always love.

“Last chance, Geralt.”

Yennefer was kneeling close to their heads, pressing her fingertips to their foreheads. He gazed up at her, and saw the dark shadows of weariness under her heavy-lidded, violet eyes despite her days of recuperation. But those eyes were as sharp as his swords. They stared down at him, and permitted no leeway in him for a scintilla of doubt.

“Do you want me to transfer Jaskier’s memories into you?”

He turned his head on the floor to gaze at Jaskier’s familiar profile. From the corner of his eye, he could see the circles and runes Yennefer had drawn with a red chalk around Jaskier’s dark-haired head: the same circles and runes fringed his own head. He stared at Jaskier, and he ignored the prickle in his constricting throat, the congestion high up in his nose, the searing of the edges of his eyes.

He allowed his fingers to cross the inches of space between his hand and Jaskier’s. To brush them against Jaskier’s fingers, one last time.

Now, at this point of no return, he finally knew with excruciating clarity what he was so sorry for.

_I’m sorry, Jaskier._

_I’m so sorry, my love, for murdering you._

“Do it,” Geralt rasped, and he didn’t care that it was with that cracked, guttural voice that laid bare his broken heart for the apathetic world and its apathetic gods to trample on.

He turned his head until he was looking up at the ceiling again.

He shut his stinging eyes.

Yennefer had prepared him as best she could for the imminent, ravaging agony. He had agreed to her using her magic to paralyze him, to fetter him with invisible shackles so that he didn’t thrash around and unintentionally harm Yennefer or Jaskier. In the records from Aretuza, a survivor of the spell had described the agony as “fire-hot, metal spikes grinding through one’s head, over and over, forever”, and another had described those spikes as being as large as “castle turrets made of molten steel”.

Geralt had endured multiple witcher trials at Kaer Morhen, including the Trial of the Grasses, and the Trial of the Dreams. He’d endured experimental trials that no one else had survived, that had cursed him with his white hair since he was a teenager. He’d endured bout after bout of delusions, fevers, sweating, shitting, and vomiting beyond all reason—but all of that had been mild compared to the agony he was experiencing now.

Those survivors of the spell had been right: the first onslaught of pain did indeed feel like a fire-hot, metal spike the size of a castle turret stabbing into his skull and grinding its way through his brain. If it hadn’t been for Yennefer pinning him to the floor with her magic, he would have convulsed violently and jerked his head away from her fingers. His chest heaved with erratic panting. His whole body shook in place as another gargantuan spike of agony pierced his head, then another, then another.

Then the torrent of vivid memories deluged his mind like a sea of fire compressing itself into his skull.

He started to scream and scream, but Yennefer didn’t halt the spell, and he was grateful. He shook on the floor, the muscles in his arms, his legs, his torso, even his neck bulging and straining to no avail. The combination of the never-ending spikes in his mind and the never-ending flood of Jaskier’s memories was almost too much to bear. Listening and clinging onto Jaskier’s comforting heartbeat, above his screams of pain, was the one thing that kept him sane, that kept him going.

Jaskier needed him. Jaskier needed him to be strong, to survive this.

At some point, Geralt became dissociated from the incessant onslaught of agony. He didn’t know how he’d done it, or if Yennefer was responsible for it, but he was—on that beach, under that cloudless sky, basking in the sunshine that cascaded upon him while frothing, rolling waves licked at his bare feet.

He was digging his toes into the wet sand. He was tilting his head back to let the sunshine sweep across his smooth cheeks. He’d taken off his doublet, and his loose shirt billowed in the breeze. The same breeze ruffled his medium-length hair.

He turned his head to the right, and saw—himself.

There he was, standing with his bare feet on the wet sand, his white linen shirt an eye-catching contrast to his dark brown trousers. He’d rolled the sleeves up to his elbows. He’d rolled the legs of his trousers up to mid-shin. His long, white hair was fluttering in the breeze, and he raised a hand to hook his hair behind his right ear.

Was that a doppler pretending to be him? A magical mirage? A hallucination resulting from the spell’s agony?

No.

No, that _was_ him, because this wasn’t a mirage or a hallucination. This was a memory. This was Jaskier’s memory. He was seeing himself through Jaskier’s eyes.

He was seeing himself through Jaskier’s eyes, in that rare, fragile moment of true happiness.

He couldn’t tell whether he’d been the one to gasp, or Jaskier. But he saw himself turn that head of white hair to gaze at him—no, at Jaskier. He was stunned at the warmth that he saw in his crinkled amber eyes, at the tenderness that he hadn’t known was on his face then. That he hadn’t known he was capable of showing to anyone, of _feeling_ for anyone.

But Jaskier wasn’t just anyone.

Jaskier had stood by his side ever since they’d met for the first time in that tavern in Posada. Jaskier had ignored every attempt to drive him away, had refused to leave him. Refused to acknowledge that he was bad news, that he wasn’t human. That he was a broken, dead monster that was never worthy of happiness, that was worth nothing.

With naught but a look, Jaskier had made him believe otherwise, no matter how many times the world was determined to prove him wrong.

With naught but a smile, Jaskier had cracked the shell enclosing him, no matter how many times he was determined to rebuild it.

He could feel Jaskier’s beautiful blue eyes crinkle. He could feel Jaskier’s dark pink, supple lips stretch and curve up into that gratified smile—and there he was, staring back at Jaskier with those warm eyes, with that tenderness.

He felt an incredible, rousing rush of heat through his chest, throughout his whole body, as if the sun had bloomed within him.

_I love you, Geralt of Rivia, so much. I will always love you._

Jaskier’s calm, sonorous voice seemed to speak from the very depths of his core and emanate through him. The astounding declaration shocked him into a wordless state. If he was living Jaskier’s memory, and he was seeing it through Jaskier’s eyes, then that meant—he was thinking whatever Jaskier was thinking in the moment. Feeling whatever Jaskier was feeling.

And those thoughts, those feelings were real and true.

Jaskier had loved him, and been in love with him, even then. Jaskier had gazed at him, at his monstrous amber eyes and his freakish white hair, knowing how much blood stained his hands—and loved him, still.

Jaskier had loved him.

But not anymore.

He alone would remember this rare, fragile moment of true happiness from this day onward.

He alone would remember that for a while, a little while, on a beach under a cloudless sky the color of Jaskier’s eyes, someone had truly loved him as he was.

His vision blurred into a dark grey and brown cloudiness. He blinked, and blinked, and it took him ages to realize that he was staring up at the ceiling of the bedroom. That he was no longer screaming his lungs out, or shaking on the floor, or panting like a dying horse.

The spell was complete.

He had survived.

Agonizing grooves continued to carve their way down his cheeks, his temples, from his sore eyes. They might never stop, for there were many, many drops of tears in a sea.

Slender fingers stroked the curvature of his head, and carded through his hair.

He slowly turned his head to gaze at Jaskier. Jaskier appeared no different than he had before the spell had begun. Jaskier looked like he was sleeping, and having a tranquil dream that quirked up those dark pink, dry lips.

Jaskier’s dreams did not belong to Geralt.

Jaskier’s memories did now.

Geralt struggled up to a sitting position on the floor. He was so exhausted that he couldn’t sit with his spine straight, and had to press his trembling hands on the floor just to stay upright. He folded his trembling legs to one side and turned his whole body until he faced Jaskier—and Yennefer.

Her face was deceptively blank. She had warned him that during the spell, some “spill” of memories from Jaskier into her mind might occur. He didn’t ask her which memories she’d seen. He didn’t have to, not when her violet eyes were glistening and red-rimmed.

She carded those slender fingers through Jaskier’s hair, and said, “We were too merciful to the sick fucker.”

Geralt said nothing. That sick fucker was already dead, burnt to ashes along with his repugnant tapestries and his palatial lair: he and Yennefer had made sure that all of his slaves had departed by then, free to begin new lives elsewhere with whatever coins they’d grabbed from their dead master’s coffers.

He yearned to touch Jaskier, to also run his fingers through that dark hair. To caress Jaskier’s cheek. To kiss Jaskier on the forehead.

But he didn’t have the right to do any of that.

Jaskier might very well still claw his eyes out after awakening. Or recoil from him, and drive him away with rage-filled, screamed words or a punch to the face. What he would do after such a rejection, such an ending to the remnants of his bond to Jaskier—well, he was keenly aware that Yennefer had concealed his weapons again. That even the knives from the kitchen were missing.

That was fine. He didn’t need a knife or a sword. He could just as effortlessly use the pitchfork at the head of the farmer’s grave to finish the job, messy as it would be.

There was probably some sort of joke there to be made, but he couldn’t unearth it.

He almost felt like crying once more when he lifted Jaskier off the floor and laid the limp, unconscious man on the bed. His left arm refused to let go of Jaskier’s shoulders. Jaskier’s head was resting against his chest, over his linen shirt. Jaskier’s eyes were still shut, and his stubbled face was still pale, but there was also a slight flush to his cheeks.

He could hear the stable rhythm of Jaskier’s heartbeat resonating from that hirsute, lean chest. It was a sound he’d thought he would never hear again after the battle in the barn, a sound he knew like no other.

He could hear it—and it had to be enough.

He laid Jaskier’s head on the pillow. He tugged the blanket over Jaskier’s body up to the neck. He stood beside the bed, and stared down at Jaskier’s serene face, and didn’t react when Yennefer left the room in silence. He would see her again, regardless of what was going to happen after Jaskier woke up.

How could he not say goodbye to her one last time, after everything she’d done for him and Jaskier?

But for now, all he could do was wait for his sentence.

For one last chance to give to Jaskier his penance.

◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊

An hour before dawn, Geralt stood up, then moved the wooden chair he’d been sitting on from Jaskier’s bedside and out of the bedroom. He set it in the corner at the end of the passageway outside the bedroom, next to the window that overlooked the front yard. He sat on it again, in the cold shadow of the corner. He leaned his aching head and slumped shoulder against the wall.

He waited for his old friend to claim him. His old friend who was patient, who outlasted everyone and everything, and always won, in the end. His old friend, who would be merciful to him at the very end, when no one else would be anymore.

He waited for judgment to arrive with the rising sun.

He stared out the window at the infinite darkness with sore eyes at half-mast. He hadn’t eaten anything since yesterday morning, but he had no appetite. His empty belly roiled, with apprehension, with grief.

He was a selfish bastard. A coward who couldn’t bear to watch those beautiful blue eyes open, and land on him, and blaze with hatred towards him. So here he sat in this cold, gloomy corner instead, in his dark grey linen shirt, his black trousers, his boots—ready to depart from this place. To walk away from the one he loved. To cut short his prolonged life, if that was what the one he loved wished.

He was a truly selfish bastard, for he hoped that Jaskier’s wish was anything but that.

He hoped that Jaskier’s eyes would land on him, and gleam with a smidgen of kindness that he didn’t deserve. He hoped that Jaskier’s lips would curve up in a smile with that smidgen of kindness, that he didn’t deserve at all.

He hoped with a broken heart that refused to wither away, that refused to accept it was dead.

He hoped.

The sky began to illumine with striations of orange, gold, and blue on the horizon. The rising sun cast its brilliant beams through the window, and across his straightened legs. He didn’t feel their warmth. His hands and feet felt ice-cold, and so did his insides. He sucked in a cool, quivering breath. He swallowed down a dry throat.

From inside the bedroom, he could hear Jaskier waking up.

He could hear the rustling of that woolen blanket, of that oversized tunic as Jaskier sat up in bed and then swung those lean legs over the side. He could hear Jaskier’s bare feet alight on the wooden floor. Hear Jaskier’s hesitant steps approach the open bedroom door.

Geralt sat up and pulled his lower legs in. His trembling hands clenched into fists on his lap.

He stared on at the breaking dawn.

He heard Jaskier shamble into the sunlit passageway. He heard Jaskier’s stable, comforting heartbeat quickening in that hirsute chest. He breathed, and breathed, while Jaskier silently stood and stared at him.

He drew in another quivering breath. He blinked hard to stave off the stinging in the back of his eyes. He stared at the golden, warm sky for several more seconds—and knew that whatever unfurled from Jaskier’s mouth, it would hurt him more than any honed blade could.

The silence that reigned over them was so dense that he could hear Jaskier’s lips unsticking as they parted. Hear Jaskier inhale before speaking.

And he was right: the words that calm, sonorous voice murmured to him ripped him apart inside with the force of an exploding sun.

“I love the way you just—sit in the corner and brood.”

Geralt swiveled his head towards Jaskier. He stared at Jaskier with wide, disbelieving eyes, and he had to prop himself with one hand on the wall as he stood up on wobbly legs.

Jaskier was staring at his face with those beautiful blue eyes that shone in the sunlight. They were wide and unblinking, but there was no hatred in them. There was no hostility whatsoever in them. With his heightened vision, he could see how blown open their pupils were.

Jaskier was staring at him as if he—was not a monster.

Jaskier was staring at him exactly like he had in that tavern in Posada so long ago, while they’d sat facing each other in that sunlit corner, their fates sealed and intertwined forever.

“Oh, I’m sorry. That was rather rude of me, wasn’t it?”

For the first time in their decades of acquaintance, Geralt saw Jaskier blush from forehead to chin and lower those large, innocent eyes in bashfulness. Jaskier wrung his hands and clutched at the linen cloth of the tunic like a nervous boy who was—standing in front of his crush.

In any other life in which this was the very first time they met, in which he had not brought so much suffering to Jaskier, he would already be teasing Jaskier with a raised eyebrow and a roguish smile. He would have been fascinated with this human man who didn’t fear him, who looked at him and did not see what everyone else saw.

But this life was the only one Geralt would ever have. In this life, in this moment, it took every iota of willpower that he possessed to not rush over to Jaskier and embrace that familiar, precious body tight to his own.

He didn’t have the right to do that.

The blushing man who stood in front of him, who stared at him once more with those wide, shining eyes, was not his Jaskier. This Jaskier did not know who he was, what he was.

This Jaskier did not deserve to be tainted by the likes of him.

“Hello,” Jaskier said. “I wish I could introduce myself, but—I don’t know what my name is. Or where I am.”

In the hours since the spell that transferred Jaskier’s memories into him had occurred, Geralt had accustomed himself to Jaskier’s memories popping up in the forefront of his mind. The first few had surprised him with their lucidity, their randomness. But after those, he realized that he could control them to a certain extent: when he concentrated on a particular thought, the memory that popped up would be relevant to that thought.

Now, as he thought about Jaskier’s name, a memory from Jaskier’s teenage years surged forward with startling definition: Jaskier was sprawled on his elbows on a stone floor, staring down at it with wet eyes while his nose bled and his torn lower lip also bled. A bearded, stocky man in regal clothing, Jaskier’s father, was standing over Jaskier and bellowing down at him.

_Your name is Julian Alfred Pankratz! You are Viscount de Lettenhove, and you will cease these foolish activities of music and singing that shame our family!_

The meaty fist that Jaskier’s father brandished was spattered with bright blood.

If the fucking bastard was still alive, Geralt would gladly slam his fist into that ugly, hate-filled face that was nothing like his son’s.

“Do—do you know my name?”

Geralt blinked, and there he was, standing in the sunlit passageway outside the bedroom, where he’d always been. He sauntered up to Jaskier, leaving a space of four feet between them.

“Your name is Jaskier,” he murmured.

Jaskier didn’t flinch from him. Jaskier stared up at him with those wide, shining eyes. With dark pink, supple lips that curled up in an enthralled smile. With flushed, stubbled cheeks.

“Jaskier.” Jaskier lowered his eyes, then stared up at Geralt again, his smile widening. “I like it.”

The smile was a low-key version of that gratified smile that Jaskier had bequeathed him on that beach under that cloudless sky. It still had the power to devastate him, to make his throat constrict and prickle, to make his eyes sear with wetness at the edges.

“You chose it for yourself.” Geralt cleared his throat. He gestured at their surroundings with one hand. “And, uhm—this is a farmhouse. It’s several days away by foot from Gors Velen.”

Jaskier made one of his silly faces. Somehow, it devastated Geralt even more than the smile had. The reports from Aretuza had been right about this as well: Jaskier didn’t have his memories anymore, but his personality was intact.

This Jaskier wasn’t his Jaskier—and yet, still was, in the most agonizing of ways.

“Do I live here?” Jaskier pointed at his own chest with a forefinger, making another silly face. “Am I a farmer?”

Geralt let out a huff of inaudible laughter—and then had to shut his eyes for a moment, at the magnitude of him remembering how to laugh. Of being able to laugh in any way, after everything that had happened to him and Jaskier.

“Yes. You live here, for now.” He opened his eyes. “And no.” His lips twitched. “No, you’re not a farmer. You’re a bard.”

Jaskier’s mouth sagged open in that familiar, dramatic way that Geralt thought he would never see again.

“I _sing?_ ”

Geralt’s lips twitched again.

“Yes, and you play a lute. You do both well.”

It was the truth. Despite what he’d said to Jaskier so many years ago on that riverbank in Rinde, that Jaskier’s singing was like “ordering a pie and finding it has no filling”, it was the truth that he should have told Jaskier earlier. That he should have told Jaskier when the talented musician had been able to appreciate it.

“Oh!” Jaskier smiled to himself. Seconds later, the smile wavered. “Oh.” The smile waned into a slight frown. “I don’t remember. I don’t remember singing. Or writing any songs. Or playing a lute.”

“It’s the truth,” Geralt said.

Jaskier gazed up at him once more, with wide, warm eyes, and murmured, “Do we know each other? We obviously must, if you know my name, and my profession.”

Another of Jaskier’s memories surged to the forefront of his mind, and it was one that Jaskier had clearly treasured: their very first meeting in that tavern in Posada, while they’d sat facing each other in that sunlit corner, staring at each other.

It was surreal to see himself through Jaskier’s eyes here, to see how conspicuous his white hair and amber eyes were against the shadows—as if he was a sublime being of light. It was what Jaskier was thinking while he spoke.

_Oh, fun. White hair. Big, old loner. Two very, very scary-looking swords._

_I know who you are._

Even then, even as he had risen to his feet to walk away from Jaskier, to get away from this mad, young human man who had no idea what he really was, no idea how _dangerous_ he was—Jaskier loved him, and had already fallen in love with him.

Jaskier had loved him at first sight.

“Yes,” Geralt replied, swallowing hard. “We know each other.”

That charming smile returned to Jaskier’s appealing face, and it was no less devastating to Geralt this time. Jaskier took a step forward, closing the distance between them.

“Are you my friend?”

And another of Jaskier’s memories surged forward, another so familiar to Geralt: he was in that bathtub in that Cintran inn room, after Jaskier had poured that bucket full of clean water over his head. But he was seeing it through Jaskier’s eyes, and he was in Jaskier’s skin, Jaskier’s heart.

_I’m not your friend._

He felt Jaskier’s pain upon hearing those churlish words from his mouth. A pain akin to being stabbed through the chest with a dagger and then feeling the dagger dragged out inch by inch.

Jaskier had hidden that pain so well from him. Jaskier had retorted with that jab about “letting strangers rub chamomile oil all over his lovely bottom”—and outraged as he’d been, it had never occurred to him that Jaskier had said that precisely to distract him from noticing anything.

He hadn’t meant those words.

What he’d actually meant to say, if he had been a wordsmith like Jaskier, if he hadn’t been such a coward—if he had remembered to strengthen his heart like Vesemir had sagely counseled him, remembered that he had owned it, and that Jaskier had a heart of his own—was something else entirely.

_I’m not your friend because I’m a dangerous monster, and anyone who grows close to me will suffer. And die._

_And I will be alone again._

“Yes. I am your friend, Jaskier,” he rasped.

_Your very best friend in the whole wide world._

But he didn’t have the right to say that. He had rejected those words when they’d come from Jaskier in that Cintran inn room, when he should have appreciated them then. When he should have seen the truth in them.

He cleared his throat, then said, “I am Geralt.” He drew in a breath that snagged at its end. “Geralt of Rivia.”

He waited for Jaskier to recoil from him. To look at him with the disgust that so many had hurled at him just from hearing his name.

“Geralt,” Jaskier murmured.

It was just his broken, stubborn heart that refused to stop hoping, that believed Jaskier had said his name as if it encompassed Jaskier’s whole world.

“Geralt,” Jaskier murmured again, with that devastating, sweet smile. “It suits you.”

Geralt drew in another breath, a long, steadier one, then said, “I am a witcher.”

Jaskier didn’t so much as blink at him.

“I don’t know what that is,” Jaskier said, shaking his head. Then that smile turned into a mischievous one with crinkled, twinkling eyes. “Is it another word for ‘supremely gorgeous man’?”

Gods, Jaskier was giving him that flirtatious smile that had sent a profusion of women flocking to Jaskier time and again in the past. He knew that, because he’d witnessed it with his own eyes—and even he was defenseless against that impish wink that Jaskier would fire at the peak of his musical performance.

“No. Uhm.” Geralt lowered his eyes, mortified at the heat he felt suffusing his cheeks. “No, a witcher is—a witcher hunts and kills monsters.”

He raised his eyes, and saw Jaskier’s smile wavering again.

“Monsters?” Jaskier whispered, his brow creasing.

“Yes. Like wyverns. And ghouls, and cockatrices. And—archgriffins.” Geralt squeezed his eyes shut, then opened them. “I know you don’t remember. But, yes. There are monsters in this world.”

_Monsters, just like me._

But he didn’t say the damning words, for he was a selfish bastard and a coward, and he wanted to bask in Jaskier’s amiable gaze, in Jaskier’s radiant smiles, for a while. Just a little while more.

“And you hunt and kill them? By yourself?”

“Sometimes, I will join other witchers in a hunt. But I usually work alone.” Geralt cleared his throat, then said, “It’s hazardous work. Witchers are—different from humans. We’re stronger. We have heightened senses. We had to go through trials to gain the abilities to fight and kill monsters. Sometimes those trials leave a witcher with—certain irreversible traits.”

Jaskier’s forehead smoothened. Jaskier’s eyes were tender. They were eyes that looked at him, and still did not see a monster.

“Like your hair,” Jaskier murmured. “And your eyes.”

Geralt swallowed past a boulder in his throat, then nodded once.

Jaskier’s eyes crinkled again as he said, “Well, it seems to me that being a witcher is a noble vocation. You’ve saved many people, haven’t you?”

_I couldn’t save you._

What Geralt said instead, if he didn’t want to snap like a twig underfoot at the racking enormity of those four words, was, “I do what I can.”

A comfortable silence ensued. Jaskier stared at his face, at his eyes, but he didn’t feel irritated or self-conscious by the blatant scrutiny. Jaskier stared at him like no other human did. Jaskier stared at him as if he was all that existed, as if there was nothing else that mattered.

Jaskier stared at him as if he was worth everything.

“You have truly beautiful eyes.”

Geralt stared back at Jaskier with stinging eyes, and he didn’t know what to say. At least until Jaskier blushed from forehead to chin again and lowered those large blue eyes that were so much more beautiful than his would ever be.

“They’re—abnormal,” he said. “Compared to yours.”

Jaskier’s forehead furrowed once more. He stared at Geralt for a long minute in contemplative silence, then said, “I don’t know what I look like.”

Geralt tore his gaze away from Jaskier’s face, and glanced at the open bedroom door.

“Would you like a mirror?”

He returned his gaze to Jaskier, and found Jaskier still staring at his face. Jaskier’s eyes roamed his facial features, from his forehead down to his amber eyes, down his cheekbones and his nose to his lips, to his chin.

“I doubt I’m anywhere as beautiful as you.”

Geralt didn’t know what to say to that either. No one, not even Yennefer, had ever told him that he had beautiful eyes, that he was beautiful—and meant it with so much sincerity, with no ulterior motive.

No one was like Jaskier.

On its own volition, his right hand reached up to touch Jaskier’s stubbled cheek. To brush the back of his trembling fingers across it, from the corner of those dark pink lips to that shapely ear.

Jaskier didn’t recoil from him. Jaskier didn’t scream rage-filled words at him, or punch him in the face.

“I’ll never shine as bright as you,” he rasped.

His throat seized into a choking pinhole when Jaskier raised both hands to grasp his hand. His nose started to congest high up in his skull, and his eyes burned when Jaskier pressed his hand to that flushed, stubbled cheek with both hands. When Jaskier shut his eyes and turned that dark-haired head to press those dark pink lips on his palm.

He was still a broken, dead monster unworthy of salvation. He deserved to lose Jaskier and his generous love, for what he’d done to him, for failing to save him. He deserved to see only hatred towards him in those beautiful blue eyes.

But Jaskier refused to let him go.

Jaskier, who was not his Jaskier, refused to hate him.

Jaskier, who was not his Jaskier and yet was, had fallen in love with him at first sight, again.

“I’m more than a little scared right now, if you must know,” Jaskier murmured.

Geralt squeezed his eyes shut when Jaskier stepped forward and closed the distance between them. His breath hitched deep in his lungs at Jaskier’s arms wrapping around his torso, at Jaskier’s hands clutching at his linen shirt. At Jaskier laying that precious head on his chest, over the broken, stubborn thing in it that still refused to stop hoping, to accept it was dead—to stop beating, and beating, as it always did, even when he hadn’t heard it.

“I have so many questions. But—” Jaskier tightened his arms around Geralt’s torso. “I’ll be all right, if you’re here.”

Geralt peeled open his eyes, and all he saw were blobs of colors. He swallowed hard, then again, and his hands quivered at his sides, and he tried to remember how to breathe. Every place that his body touched Jaskier’s smoldered with a soothing heat that warded off the cold, the dark. Every beat of Jaskier’s heart resonated in his ears, his mind, and extinguished the screams of the dead farmer, the lilting voice of the dead, sick fucker whose name he would never say again.

He was a bloody selfish bastard and a coward and a useless, worthless _monster_ —but Jaskier wanted him here. Jaskier would be all right if he was here.

Jaskier wanted him to stay.

He squeezed his wet eyes shut again when he enfolded Jaskier in his arms, when Jaskier let out a low sigh of contentment. He hated himself for savoring every touch of his hands on Jaskier’s body, for being able to stroke Jaskier’s nape again, to rub Jaskier’s back again. He hated himself for taking more from Jaskier than he already had. For being so weak, and still so wanting.

“Are you hungry?”

He received a prompt answer to his rasped question.

“Oh gods, I really, really am,” Jaskier said, pressing that stubbled cheek to his chest. “I think I could eat an entire horse.”

Geralt opened his eyes to half-mast, and blinked hard. He didn’t know whether to laugh, or cry, or gag on the horrific memory of seeing Jaskier eating the raw flesh of that dead cow, and having his mind replace the cow with Roach. He was thankful that he had yet to experience any of Jaskier’s memories from the months after their fateful sojourn in Murivel—but it was just a matter of time.

It was what he deserved, more than anything.

“I would really rather that you didn’t eat Roach.”

Jaskier lifted his head and leaned back to stare at him with a childlike expression of bafflement.

“What? Why would I want to eat a _cockroach?_ ”

Geralt lowered his eyes and let out a huff of laughter, one that brought a small, soft smile to Jaskier’s face.

“No, I’m talking about—my horse, Roach. She’s a chestnut mare.” He made eye contact with Jaskier again. “She’s downstairs, in a wing attached to the kitchen. With the cow and chickens.”

“Oh.” Jaskier’s smile broadened. “Does that mean we have milk and eggs?”

“And smoked cheese. And fresh vegetables from the patches in the backyard. And salted meat, and sausages.” He tilted his head to one side and pressed his lips together in a chagrined expression, then said, “There’s no more bread. I’ll have to bake some more.”

Jaskier stared at him with eyes wide in awe.

“You know how to bake bread.”

Geralt raised his eyebrows, and said, “Yes. We have all the necessary ingredients.”

Jaskier stared at him for a few more seconds, then murmured, “You really are perfect, aren’t you.”

_No. No, I’m as far from perfect as any creature can get._

_Why can’t you see how monstrous I am, my love?_

But Geralt didn’t say any of that. Instead, with that damn heat suffusing his cheeks again, he said, “We can talk more in the kitchen. You can get the eggs, and I’ll fry them.”

Those beautiful blue eyes lit up like the sun that warmed Geralt’s back with its morning beams.

“Sunny side up?”

Slowly, Geralt’s lips cracked and curved up into something that he’d thought they never would again: a small, genuine smile that brimmed with fondness.

“Sunny side up,” he rasped. “Just the way you like them.”

Jaskier wanted him here. Jaskier wanted him to stay. Jaskier would be all right if he was here—and perhaps, that was a hopeful beginning for his penance to Jaskier. He hated himself, but that didn’t mean he didn’t love Jaskier, or that he couldn’t lavish love on Jaskier, if that was what Jaskier needed.

Jaskier—his bard companion, his best friend, his brother-in-arms, his beloved for the rest of his life—needed him.

Jaskier still lived on in him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> That "angst with a happy ending" tag? It's as true as ever, as difficult as it may be to believe. Trust in me to deliver that happy ending! 🌄
> 
> In Part III: Geralt and Jaskier live with the consequences of Geralt's drastic choice to save Jaskier. Geralt believes that he will lose Jaskier again--and their fleeting domestic life together crumbles when Jaskier begins to ask questions about who he'd been, and what had happened to him ...
> 
> ______________________________________
> 
> Other potential triggers in Part II not tagged: Geralt feels extreme self-loathing to the point of constant suicidal ideation, due to his twisted self-image worsened by the trauma of events in Part I. Jaskier is catatonic, then snaps out of it to savagely attack Geralt and scream how much he hates Geralt, because Tenebris had also broken his mind. Graphic albeit short depictions of Tenebris's heinous actions as a serial killer sorcerer. Geralt and Yennefer have a violent showdown with Tenebris, and Geralt repeatedly dismembers the sorcerer until he and Yennefer kill him. Geralt chooses to endure an agonizing spell that transfers all of Jaskier's memories into him, without Jaskier being able to give permission, to stop Jaskier from killing himself.


End file.
